Portrait of England
Howard Wyce
Equivocal Conservatism
Max Eastman
New Facts on Katyn
Vasily Yershov
Slavery~~
Ludwig von Mises
"Freedom is
Why Yalta Matters
An Editorial
What do ~g call vourself? -_.-.:----
-_-:. -_._~
--In this age of labels, a man is often pressed for an answer to the question as to what he calls himself. For ourselt'es, we can ansu:er no lnore exactly than we did in our first issue.. The Freeman will he at once radical~ libera1, conservative~ and reactionary. It will be radical because it ,vill go to the root of questions. It will be liberal because it will stand for the Inaxinlunl of individual libel'ty, for tolerance of all honest diversity of opinion~ and for faith in the efficacy of solving our internal problems by discussion and reason rather than suppression and force. It will be conservative because it believes in conserving the ~reat constructive achievenlents of the past..And it will he reactionary if that means reacting against ignorant and reckless efforts to destroy precisely what is most precious in our great economic,! politi cal, and cultural heritage in the nalTIC of alleged "progress.'!'!
That teas our "label" on October 2, 1950.
It remains so today.
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THE
AFortnightly
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Editor
Managing Editor
Contents
FLORENCE NORTON
VOL. 3, NO. 12
MARCH 9, 1953
Elitorials The Fortnight..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. \Vhy Yalta Matters.................................. Italy's Taxes and Ours......... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. The Butter Glut... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. Jefferson vs. Stevenson How to Underdevelop................................
Articles Germany's Dilemma "Freedom is Slavery" Portrait of England Holland's Heroic Achievement The American Disease New Facts on Katyn
401 403 404 405 406 406
407 410 412 415 417 419
Equivocal Conservatism MAX EASTMAN An Upside Down World , EDWARD HUNTER Shorter and Better BEN RAY REDMAN Our Foreign Policy ALBERT C. WEDEMEYER Honest-to...God Nephew WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN Noble in Both Senses RICHARD MC LAUGHLIN A.E.F. in Siberia HOFFMAN NICKERSON Walpole Himself ALIX DU POY News About Matthew Arnold BEN RAY REDMAN
423 424 425 426 426 427 428 429 430
Books
EMMA GRAY TRIGG SJANNA SOLUM
418 420
From Our Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 400
Arts and Entertainments
ALEXANDER MARSHACK
421
This is What They Said. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 416
Worth Hearing Again
418
THE FREEMAN is published fortnightly. Publication Office~TOrange, Conn. Editorial and General Offices, 240 Madison Avenue, New York 16, N . .r. Copyrighted in the United States 1953, by the Freeman Magazine, Inc. Henry Hazlitt, President; Lawrence Fertig, Vice President; Claude Robinson, Secretary; Kurt Lassen, Treasurer. Entered as second class matter at the Post Office at Orange, Conn. Rates: Twenty-five cents the copy; five dollars a year in the United States, nine dollars for two years; six dollars a year elsewhere. The editors can not be responsible for unsolicited manuscripts unless return postage or, hetter, a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed. Articles signed with a name, pseudonym, Of initials do not necessarily represent the opinion of the editors. either as to substance or style.
j~l1
Printed in U.S.A., by Wilson H. Lee Co., Orange, Connecticut.
is the author of a number of searching books about contemporary problems. Of these, The Dream We Lost, describing her life in Soviet Russia and her conclusions about the Soviet system, first won her fame and acclaim in this country, and The China Story, examining our policy in the Far East, was a best seller in 1951. PREDA UTLEY
FREDA UTLEY LUDWIG VON MISES HOWARD WYCE MARTIN EBON PETER KAVANAGH VASILY YERSHOV
Poems Spring Music in Winter............ Neighborhood Witch
Our Contributors
LUDWIG VON MISES, world famous economist, is the author of Human Action (1949) and other books. He conducts the Freernan seminar on essential problems of the social sciences, which was held in New York in 1951 and in San Francisco during the summer of 1952. HOWARD WYCE, a contributor to the fornler British literary monthly Horizon, is now a freelance writer living in London. He is currently working on a novel. MARTIN EBON is the author of World Com'YJ'l,unism Today, a scholarly study of the policies and ramifications of the International Communist movement. In 1952 he won the Freedoms Foundation award for his signed editorials in the Saturday Evening Post.
COLONEL VASILY YERSHOV, a former member of the Soviet Army, fled from his country in 1948 and "chose freedom" in America. He comes to us with the recommendation of David Dallin, a leading expert on Soviet affairs. PETER KAVANAGH is an Irish traveler and writer, located at present in New York City. MARSHACK, correspondent, author, and photographer, got his background knowledge for his article "Cinerama-A Third Dimension" as a former director in radio and television.
ALEXANDER
In Forthcoming Issues "Government by the Insane," an analysis of the Communist mentality as observed in the Far East by Edward Hunter, inventor of the now popular term brain-washing, and author of the startling book Brain-Washing in China,. a second installment of Howard Wyce's "Portrait of England," dealing with the present temper and condition of British arts, letters, and the drama; a discussion by P. A. Hayek of the current revival of the political philosophy of Lord Acton.
11:...-.-.._F_R_O_M_O_U_R_RE_A_D_E_RS
l
A Service Rendered You have rendered a service greater than any magazine I have ever had the privilege of reading. Sincerely, the good it is doing Americans and America can not be estimated; I wish all teachers could read your articles in the Freeman. Jacksonville, Ill. SARA JOHN ENGLISH
For integrity and restraint As a teacher I have, for some time, been disturbed by the failure of educational leaders and writers to apply the test of intellectual competence and intellectual integrity to the question of academic freedom. If we are to have genuine freedom of thought, the academic person must himself safeguard it through his own integrity and restraint. When he steps outside his field, he must be content to be a mere amateur in the rough and tumble of every day opinions. Your gallant fight in the Freeman for true academic freedom leads me to ask you to inject this note into such discussion. Richrnond, Va. RACHEL CARY
College Election Polls Your reader Mr. Geoffrey Curtis expresses interest in the results of election polls taken at colleges. Well, according to results announced on Election Day by the University of Maryland student newspaper, the student body was 56.40/0 for Eisenhower, the faculty 650/0 for Stevenson. In our Economics Department, the result was 9 to 3 for Stevenson (counting the Department's secretary among the Stevenson supporters). College Park, Md. LELAND B. YEAGER, University of Maryland
Reprints of Rascoe My February 9 Freeman has just arrived and I hasten to inquire the cost of reprints of "Is Your Child an Isolate?" by Burton Rascoe. You've no idea how greatly needed is this information. There are many schoolteachers who thoroughly understand the significance of the One World teaching but who lack backing in any effort to resist. This is superb material! Baltimore, Md. HELEN W. JENKINS [Reprints of this article are now available. See the ad on the inside back cover for prices.]
fully informed American could dissent from it. I suggest that you reprint it in the first January issue of each year. I found the editorial pages of the February twentythird nunlber all very wise-especiallY "Let's Defend Capitalism." I like the way you state your position and your views clearly, without equivocation. It is cheering to those who agree with you, and makes it easier for those who disagree with you to know exactly what they are disagreeing about! On the whole, I thought this issue the best the Freeman has put out in a long while, although it might perhaps have sparkled a little more in places. WisdoDl can be pretty lively reading sometimes - witness Ecclesiastes. I congratulate you, and promise you a great year if you keep it up. Houston, Texas PAUL ELDREDGE
Burnham's Proponement I was distressed to read in Mr. Burnham's otherwise excellent article, "Critique of Containment," that he considers the Ukraine's culture separate from that of Russia. From Kiev, Russian culture nascented; was carried north to N ovgorod, for safety from the Mongol horde, and thence to Moscow. The cultures are intrinsically interwoven, and the disparagement of this truisDl evolved from Austrian and later German wartime expediencies, viz., to split their enemy's ranks. To propone separate cultures without granting close interrelationships is akin to propounding the separation of the United States along the Mason-Dixon Line because of the variance in culture between New England and Virginia. Bloomington, Ind. NICOLAS MIHAILOFF-SHELLY
An Aim We Endorse You are what we need in every economics and political science class in the country. You have to grow and prosper because you're the real America, even though your light is hidden under a bushel of Harpers, Atlantic Monthlys, and Saturday Reviews that our "intelligent" friends would not be without. Our aim-to supplant these on every coffee table with the Freeman/ Trona, Calif. EIL"EEN M. AND THOMAS J. STREI
No More Important Issue The l!~reeman has been unique in its courage in exposing every facet of Communist infiltration and attelnpts to confuse our thinking. There is no more important issue, a t least while our sons are still in Korea. Brooklyn, N. Y. M. KIMM
A Word of Encouragement Perhaps you will not find unwelcome a word of gratuitous encouragement for the new Freeman. I don't know how numerous we are, but I think many of us have longed for a journal of opinion that would uphold the late William Orton's kind of liberal tradition, that would have intellectual respectability, quiet authority, and some of the grace that was present in Nock's old Freeman. I take it this is more or less your present aim and I wish you the best of luck in achieving it. Sandy Hook, Conn. MORTIMER SMITH
Faith of the Freeman It was good to see "The Faith of the Freeman" printed and to know that the change in the editorial board implies no departure from that basic and straightspoken document. It is hard to see how any thoughtful and
400
THE FREEMAN
World Organizations I read L. Albert Hahn's criticism of supranational organizations with extreme interest. His approach to the subject seems to me far more judicious and realistic than I have found in some of your articles dealing with this and related topics. There is no use to rule out and denounce in toto the very idea of any sort of integration transcending rigid national boundaries, as some opponents of so-called internationalism do. It is important instead to ascertain to what extent world, or even sectional, unity can exist, and how to overcome the obstacles working against it. In his able discussion Mr. Hahn has brought forward a number of enlightening and acute facts. The discussion should be continued from there, and I hope it will be in forthcoming issues of the Freeman. Philadelphia, Pa. MARCIA BRADFORD
THE
reeman MONDAY, MARCH 9, 1953
The Fortnight The Eisenhower Administration is said to be considering a major contribution in money and munitions to help the French against the Communist forces in Indo-China. Before this country rushes in to assume yet another of the world's burdens, it would seem advisable to suggest a wider distribution of the burdens it has already taken on. In Korea, for example, our forces, apart from the South Koreans themselves, have been doing some nine tenths of the fighting and dying. Now it is arguable that, because of our comparative wealth, we should assume the lion's share of the financial cost of South Korea's defense. But there is not the slightest reason for extending this financial argument to troop numbers and to blood-letting. Surely, if the Unilted Nations is not a mere fiction, these ought to be proportioned to the relative populations of the nations involved on our side. A proportional formula, once adopted in Korea, could then conceivably be considered also for the war in IndoChina. But since the beginning of ,the Korean war, the participation formula has been incredibly onesided: we have supplied the overwhelming bulk of the manpower and the casualties, and our U. N. allies, in return for very modest "token" contributions, have been granted a veto power over sltrategy and policy decisions. There is a striking contrast between the apparent consequences of removing price controls in 1946 and rernoving them today. When price controls were abandoned in 1946, prices shot up. Or rather they appeared to shoot up. For many important goods had not been generally obtainable then at the legal price ceilings, but only in the black market. Immediately after controls were dropped in 1946, however, the official price indexes showed a substantial rise. This gave birth to the hardy myth that it was the removal of price controls that caused the subsequent inflation. Actually the inflation was caused by what always causes inflation -a continued increase in the supply of money and bank credilt. That supply was increased, in fact, from $176,000,000,000 at the end of 1945 to some $200,000,000,000 today. Now, although price controls are today being removed with almost breath-taking speed, we hear
very little talk of the "inflationary" effect of removing them. Some prices, indeed, have gone up immediately after the removal of controls, but others have been falling. And practically all the hysteria of the controllists has been directed toward the falling prices. The hysteria is chiefly about beef. Some of the very people who were most eager to have the government force down beef prices two years ago are most panicky about the decline now. A House Agriculture subcommittee wants the Agriculture Department to 'buy "surplus" beef for donation to a school lunch program. It also wants to step up mililtary procurement of beef, to put strict controls on beef imports, and to make emergency lo"ans to avert forced sales of cattle. A sense of proportion might be restored if all such people were reminded that only last December beef and veal were selling 193 per cent higher than in the period from 1935 to 1939, while the average rise of all items in the cost of living since then was only 91 per cent. They might be further reminded that the Agriculture Department has just reported a record 93,600,000 head of cattle on the nation's farms and ranches as of January 1. This is 7 per cent higher than a year earlier. A falling price is the free market's way of readjusting such situations. Only harm can come from efforts to prevent that readjustment. On February 11 the new Secretary of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, speaking in St. Paul, said more sensible and courageous things about agriculture than all his predecessors for the last two decades. He frankly favored a shift from dependence on "Government bounty" to a "free market" economy. "Price supports," he declared, "which tend to prevent production shifts toward a balanced supply in terms of demand and which encourage uneconomic production and result in continuing heavy surpluses and subsidies should be avoided. . . . Inefficiency should not be subsidized in agriculture or any other segment of our economy." In spite of the fact that he promised to carry out the present law, which provides for compulsory price supports at 90 per cent of "parity" through 1953 and 1954 (and ought to be expensive and inflationary enough to satisfy anybody), these few words of wisdom seem to have cost Secretary Benson dearly. Democratic Senators are already demanding his dismissal. MARCH 9, 1958
401
The real reason why the removal of price controls today is not accompanied by widespread fear of inflation is that President Eisenhower has made it plain that he means to halt inflation. And he has shown that he means to halt it by hal1ting its causes -deficit spending and the creation of more money and bank credit. This accounts for the apparent paradox that at a, time when price and wage ceilings are being rapidly lifted, more fear' is expressed of deflation than of inflation. In the next few weeks, in fact, the opposition to the Eisenhower disinflation policy is likely to mount in proportion to the effectiveness of that policy. Then the test will come of whether the people of this country really want to halt inflation, and understand the necessity of doing it enough to be willing to pay the price. One of the main issues in the last election was the Taft-Hartley Act. The Democratic candidate argued that it was anti-labor and ought to be repealed. The Republicans argued that it was prolabor and needed only to be "amended." The Republicans won the argument at the polls. But they already act as if they had lost it. Even Senator Taft is now proposing a set of amendments designed to please the enemies of the act rather than its friends. The C. I. O. leaders are attacking the law even more boldly than during the election. Previously, they pretended to be for "repeal" of the act; now they are unmasking Itheir real purpose, which is to restore the fantastically one-sided Wagner Act. The proposed Taft amendments would meet them half-way in this effort. The real direction in which the Taft-Hartley law' needs to be changed is indicated by Democratic Congressman Wingate Lucas of Texas, who has introduced an amendment asking for curbs on industry-wide bargaining. It is preposterous that employers should continue to be legally compelled, as they are now, to bargain with industry-wide unions, and that the country should be legally put at the mercy of such unions. Did we learn absolutely nothing from last year's steel strike? George F. Kennan, declared persona non grata by the Soviet authorities after serving a brief term as Ambassador in Moscow, prides himself on a reputation as a scholarly expert on Russian affairs. But one passage in a speech which he delivered at a meeting of the Pennsylvania Bar Association reveals a gap between what Kennan must know about the international Communist conspiracy against this country and the logical conclusions to be drawn from this situation. For Kennan warned against "doing anything at the government level that purports to affect directly the governmental system in another country." This, he continued, "is not consistent with our international obligations. It is not consistent with the maintenance of formal diplomatic relations with another country. It is replete with possibilities of misunderstanding and bitterness." Now under the system of diplomatic relations 402
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which prevailed before our totalitarian age these maxilns would have been entirely sound. But do they have any relevance to a situation in which the Soviet Union and its satellites are devoting a large part of their national energies to espionage and subversive intrigues designed to sap and undermine the governmental systems of all non-Communist states? The Kremlin has challenged us not to a Marquis of Queensberry boxing match, but to a barroom brawl, and our tactics must be adjusted accordingly, if defeat is to be avoided. The old saying that Satan finds plenty of mischief for idle hands seems to apply with special force to superfluous bureaucrats. Two recent events in Germany are cases in point. The British arrested seven Germans on charges of being involved in a "Nazi plot," which, on examination, seemed to be far below Justice Holmes's standard of clear and present danger. About the same time a branch of the swollen American High Commissioner's Office known as Reactions Analysis Staff turned out an alarmist report about the growth of "neo-Nazism" in Germany, based on a sampling of replies to such iffy questions as "What would you do if a Nazi party should try to assume power in Germany?" Both these developments, whether designedly or not, are calculated to stimulate doubt and distrust outside of Germany and to create further obstacles for a main objective of American foreign policy: the speediest possible creation of a European defense force with a substantial German contingent. News stories from New Delhi, as well as New Dealish viewers-with-alarm at home, have spoken with sadness over the recall of Mr. Chester Bowles from his post as U. S. Ambassador to India. We are told that Mr. Bowles won the undying affection of the Indian masses, or, at any rate, of the Nehru government. Chester Bowles endeared himself to dhoticlad Indian opinion-makers by borrowing a pair of striped pants from the Italian ambassador when he made his first official call. Other actions, we are informed, were equally in line ,with this initial step into New Delhi diplomatic society. As happens so often to amateur cosmopolitans, Mr. Bowles has fallen heavily for the exotic ways of India, the plight of its economy, the gaunt and mysterious figure of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He has, consequently, displayed some of the gushiness of a dowager on her first gondola trip in Venice. He has also acted quite often as if he were India's second ambassador to the United 8tates, rather than our ambassador to India. Last year he relturned to this country, loudly proclaiming that he would stir America into making a billion dollar gift to India. This highly undiplomatic shouting from the roof tops quite naturally led to disappointment. Bowles has failed to transmit the real feeling of the American people to the Nehru government. He has cushioned it against the annoyance which Americans have felt over Nehru's mollycoddling of the Chinese Communists.
Why Yalta Matters It is symboliQ of a new mood in this country that some of the loudest applause during President Eisenhower's State of the Union message followed
this implict repudiation of the YaUa Agreement: We shall never acquiesce in the enslavement of any people in order to purchase fancied gain for ourselves. I shall ask the Congress at a later date to join in an appropriate resolution making clear that this government recognizes no kind of commitments contained in secret understandings of the past with foreign governments which permit this kind of enslavement. The climate of opinion has indeed changed since Raymond Swing waxed ecstatic over Yalta with the observation that "no more appropriate news could be conceived to celebrate the birthday of Abraham Lincoln," and William L. Shirer hailed the Big Three compact as "a landmark in human history." The question may be asked: Why does this conference, held eight years ago by Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill on the shores of the Black Sea, matter today? It matters tremendously for two reasons, moral and practical. Yalta was the most cynical and immoral international transaction to which the United States was ever a partner. It was a repudiation of all the ideals for which the war against nazism was supposedly being fought. America came very close to losing its soul at Yalta. What was even more ominous than the provisions of the agreement was the absence, at the time of its publication, of any loud or audible outcry of protest. It would seem that the normal American ability to distinguish between right and wrong, freedom and slavery, had been badly blurred. From the practical standpoint, most of our serious international difficulties at the present time can be traced back to a deal which gave Stalin the keys to Eastern Europe and East Asia in exchange for paper promises which, as anyone with reasonable knowledge of the Soviet record and Soviet psychology could have anticipated, were broken almost as soon as the ink on the Yalta document was dry. The principle of self-determination for all peoples, spelled out in the first three clauses of the Atlantic Charter, was completely scrapped at Yalta, although there were hypocritical professions of respect for Atlantic Charter principles in the pact. The Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, definitely sanctioned, and the Polish annexation of large slices of ethnic German territory, foreshadowed in the agreement, were obviously against the will of the vast majority of the peoples concerned. There was no pretense of an honest plebiscite. These decisions have created millions of destitute, embittered refugees, and have drawn frontier lines which are a very probable cause of future conflicts.
Both the freedom and the territorial independence of Poland were offered as sacrifices on the altar of appeasement. The treatment of Poland, carved -up territorially and made ripe for a foreign dictatorship, its fate determined by outsiders without even the presence of a Polish spokesman, was similar in many ways to the treatment of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Substitute Yalta for Munich, Poland for Czechoslovakia, Stalin for Hitler, and Roosevelt and Churchill for Chamberlain and Daladier, and the parallel is striking. And publicists of the Left showed, and sometimes still show, the apologetic complacency about Yalta that some publicists of the Right displayed in regard to Munich. There are the same distorted and irrelevant arguments a'bout the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, about the Ukrainians in Poland. There is the same eagerness to find excuses for the assassin and the same impatience with the protests of the victim against being murdered. In both ~ases the venture in appeasement was a dismal failure. Hitler was not satiated with the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia and Stalin was not satiated with his acquisitions in Poland. The manpower and industrial resources of Czechoslovakia became an asset for the Nazi war machine. And Poland, with the Soviet Marshal Rokossovsky in command of its armed forces, is being organized against the West, so far as terror and propaganda can achieve this end. T"vo features of the Yalta Agreement represent endorsement by the United States of the legitimacy of human slavery-scarcely fit news for the birthday 0f Abraham Lincoln. There was recognition that German labor eould be used as a source of "reparations," which could be invoked as j ustification for the detention at forced labor of large numbers of German war prisoners in the Soviet Union and also in France and Great Britain. And there was a self-assumed obligation by the United States and Great Britain to repatriate all Soviet citizens in their zones of occupation. So long as this was carried out (it has now, fortunately, long been stopped) there were tragic scenes of actual and attempted suicide on the part of Soviet citizens who feared above everything else to return to their homeland of concentration camps. Finally, the secret clauses of the Yalta Agreement, which offered Stalin extensive territorial and economic concessions in the Far East at the expense of China and Japan, were immoral, unnecessary, and unwise. They were immoral because they gave away the rights and interes1ts of an ally, the Nationalist government of China, without consulting or even informing Chiang Kai-shek. They were unnecessary, because Stalin's eagerness to be in at the kill in the Far East was beyond serious doubt or question. MARCH 9, 1953
403
T1hebest proof of ,their unwisdom is the 'weekly casualty list from Korea. Both the Communist conquest of China and the war in Korea are direct consequences of drawing the Soviet armed forces into Manchuria and N'orth Korea. Yalta still has its defenders, including Dean Acheson and the court intellectuals of the Roosevelt era. It gave Stalin nothing he could not have taken anyway is one of their arguments. But the heart of the moral issue which emerges in considering the Yalta sell-out of our friends in the vain hope of placating our enemies is the difference between actively co-operating in a predatory act and being unable, temporarily, to prevent such an act. It is also suggested that it was a great achievement to get Stalin's signature on so many nicesounding promises. This would seem to be on a par with attributing financial acumen to a man who would accept at face value a number of bad checks from a notoriously fraudulent bank. The Yalta promises were far from being the first that Stalin had broken. To repudiate Yalta by joint action of the President and the Congress will not undo the evil that was wrought there. But it is the kind of moral gesture that is very much worth making. It will be an act of repentance and expiation for the past, and a pledge that the way of appeasement is not the way America will follow in the future.
Italy's Taxes and Ours The reader, after dealing with his own Form 1040 or 1040A, may wish to be entertained with cheerful tax intelligence from faraway places. We happen to have such information on hand, dealing with Italy's recently enacted income tax law. Like France and other Latin nations known for wine, women, and song, Italy has a gay tradition of nation-wide income tax evasion. The new law tries to counter this tradition by being not too drastic. In fact, Italy's income tax law is so un-drastic that, to the American taxpayer, it reads like pure escape literature. As Ame'rican taxpayers have paid some two billion dollars for aid to Italy since World War Two, they have a' very direct interest in Italian finances. Here are the details. Suppose an Italian made the equivalent of $1,600 last year, which is 1,000,,000 lire-how much tax does he pay? His tax is 3.17 per cent, while an American in the same tax bracket has to pay 20 per cent of his income in taxes. An Italian who makes the equivalent of $8,000 has to part with only 6 per cent, or the equivalent of $480. An American with the same income has to turn $1,960 over to the tax collector. This discrepancy becomes really huge when we compare larger incomes. An American who makes $80,000 has to pay more than $50,000 in taxes; an Italian with the same income pays only about $13,000. Millionaires do even better in Italy. If It 0 4
THE FREEMAN
you're lucky enough to make a million in the United States, the Collector of Internal Revenue probably lets you keep only about $114,000. An Italian who makes the equivalent of a million dollars can keep half of it. "Ve know that it is considered indelicate to attach strings to the aid we send abroad. But, at income tax time, even the most sensitive have their boorish moments, and are likely to ask: Can't countries that get grants and loans from the U. S. taxpayer impose the same kind of taxes Americans are forced to pay?
The Public Comes First The Eisenhower Administration has revived and endorsed the proposal to elevate the Federal Security Agency to a department of the government and thus to promote Mrs. Hobby to membership in the ca'binet as Secretary of a Department of Welfare, if that is whrut it will be called. The proposal is, of course, not new. It was raised several times during the incumbency of Oscar Ewing, Mrs. Hobby's predecessor. But Congress shied away from doing anything for Mr. Ewing, partly because it disliked his propaganda, but primarily because he behaved as if he was more alert to special interests than to the nartional, orpu1blic, interest., As things stand today no one expects these objections to apply to Mrs. Hobby. There are obviously many good reasons in administrative theory and practice for taking this step. The functions of the Security Agency are now part of the permanent activities of the federal government. They are more likely than not to grow. Much may be said for centering responsibility for the policies and decisions of such a far-flung and expensive undertaking. Common sense would suggest the wisdom, policy-wise and budget-wise, of weaving these loose threads into the permanent fabric of the government. These considerations assume added force rut the present time when the administration in Washington is deeply concerned over wasteful expenditures and is seriously bent on eliminating them. Long experience in Washington, however, raises strong doubts as to how efficacious this sort of solution of the central problems of excessive spending and centralization of authority has been in practice. In the now lengthy era of the expansion of federal power and spending, several of the established departments of the government, notably Agriculture and Labor, came to behave like specialinterest or pressure-group divisions of the government. What they increasingly did appeared to have little relation to the public interest and welfare. They became the inveterate spokesmen of private organizations. They used their great influence to inspire even more extreme demands from their constituents. In agriculture this process reached its climax under Secretary Brannan. Now his suc-
cess@r, Secretary Benson, attempting to redefine and limit the boundaries of public and private interest, faces the dilemma created by many years of misguided policy. The case of the Department of Labor is still worse. In their zeal for reform, administrators of tlhis department condoned mutiny at sea during the period of the unionization of seamen and longshoremen. In their efforts to secure the organization of the automobile industry, they asserted the morality and legality of the sit-down strike on the scale and in the manner in which this weapon was being employed in the auto and other industries. It is not too much to say that the policy-makers and executives of this department took the lead in subordinating the authority of the local to the federal government and in disregarding both legislative intent and the language of the law whenever it suited their purpose to do so. What happened during the tenure of Mr. Maurice Tobin a'S Secretary of Labor shows how demoralized a department can become in which the tradition of serving private interesrts has become firmly rooted. When that happens public servants begin to show little concern for the public interest. At any rate, that is the way Secretary Tobin behaved when he said thart he saw no need to be "impartial" in the steel strike of last year and that he was with the strikers "heart and soul." Attitudes of this kind toward standards of public policy and administration are hard to discard once they have been long in common use. Private interests then begin to think of agencies of government as their representatives, promoting whatever it is they happen to want at any given time. Even high officials of the government tend to lose sight of the line that divides the public from the private interest. If there is anything in the persistent rumor that the present Secretary of Labor has asked the officials of the CIO to choose an assistantsecretary, and has acceded to their demand that the person so chosen will share in mlaking the department's major policies, then Mr. Durkin-and the Administration-are pursuing a dangerous policy which would threaten to obliterate the distinction, already badly blurred, between private and public policies and objectives. During its history the Federal Security Administration has not been free from similar issues and difficulties. Like all large and gro'wing agencies, this one too has always wanted to extend its jurisdiction and authority, encroach on the prerogatives of the states, and devise new activities it is eager to undertake. The authorities in Washington have often quarreled with State administrators about how to handle unemployment compensation. The administration of grants-in-aid to States for relief has been a fertile source of difference. It culminated in the revolt several years ago by the State of Indiana, and a similar imbroglio between Washington and the government of N'ew York State. The 'character of the campaign this federal ageney has waged for national compulsory health insur-
anee, or state medicine, is too familiar to require further comment now. These issues, and many others like them, Mrs. Hobby will be required to cope with whether she becomes a Secretary of Welfare or remains Administrator of Social Security. In either case she will be d~aling with questions of government which affect agencies other than her own. She will also
be dealing with a behavior of public bodies which needs badly to be reformed and reversed. No one cabinet member or agency chief can successfully perform this operation alone. What is Reeded is clear recognition by the present Administration of the extent to which the making of public policy has fallen into private hands, and the determination to do something about it.
The Butter 'Glut In the struggle against Communism it seems important to know whether or not Russia has the atom bomb. But a great many dairymen in the United States are much more deeply concerned with the fact that a spread for bread is being produced without batterfat. N'ot only that, but acceptable substitutes for whipped cream, ice cream, cheeseand even milk itself-are being produced, and marketed in rising volume, without so much as a globule of real cow's butterfat. These facts also have their bearing on the sitruggle against Communism. At least these are relevant facts if Communism means a resort to compulsory state intervention in place of competition as the regulator of human relationships in the market place. Butter producers are less than happy to see vegetable oil margarine displacing their product as the number one spread for daily bread in the typical American household. And the government has been invited to do something about this competition. While American consumers were giving thanks last fall for bountiful harvests, their government was busy trying to store up the "surplus." Last November 30, when the butter market began to reflect something less than the official concept of a fair price-90 per cent of parity-the government began buying the so-called surplus. That "surplus" has been running about a million pounds a day. At such a rate, the government might easily be the holder of 100 million pounds of butter by the end of March when the current support plan is scheduled to expire. To the everlasting credit of many dairymen, they recognize that the compulsory intervention behind this subsidy operation is hurting rather than helping them. But they are in a minority. The theory behind a subsidy, like the one for butter, is that it benefits a Hclass" of producers. The fallacy in this theory stems from the fact that dairymen are individuals, each competing with the others for a market outlet. 'The subsidy helps keep the "class" large, but how is that of benefit to the MARCH 9, 1953
405
individual dairyman? Undoubtedly the subsidy conceals from the lessefIicient dairyman the fact that he has failed. But is it a kindly and beneficial act to entice a man into further production of a commodity which can',t meet competition by the test of consumer choice? No self-respecting cow should be asked to stand upon such an artificially supported structure-nor should her owner. It can only be a rnatter of time until tax-paying consumers of margarine, who outnumber butter producers at least ten to one, will vote to let this false structure fall. Meanwhile a Communist-hating American pubHc is unwittingly indulging in its own brand of collective compulsion which does harm to all taxpaying oitizens. And the greatest injury of all grows out of the public ill-will which inevitably builds up against the subsidized "class" or group-in this case the hard-working dairymen. This is not to say or to imply that dairymen as a group are being more heavily subsidized than are other groups. It is to say that the something-fornothing philosophy-"to each according to his need" by means of state intervention-is detrimental to the development of the ind.ividual. It encourages him to spend his efforts in the production of things which are less wanted, thus denying potential production of more useful goods and services. A peaceful and prosperous society can not develop out of adherence to such principles of collective pauperism.
Jefferson vs. Stevenson Despite his capacity for uttering suave wisecracks, Adlai Stevenson showed less than a full grasp of Thomas Jefferson's basic ideas when he affirmed at the J efferson-Jackson Day dinner that the J effersonian philosophy found expression in Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. Jefferson believed that the government which governed least governed best. This was scarcely the guiding star of the New Deal and the somewhat more abortive and innocuous "Fair Deal." Leafing through Jefferson's letters, one finds texts that would hardly be suitable for New Deal sermons. So Jefferson in Monticello wrote to Colonel Charles Yancey: "We are now taught to believe that legerdemain tricks upon paper can produce as solid wealth as hard labor in the earth. It is, vain for common sense to urge that nothing can produce but nothing." Which would be bad news for any planner. And a letter to Samuel Kerchevel contains small comfort for the lavish spenders of public funds: "We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. . . . Private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. . . And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." It is a pity that Jefferson is not available as· a speaker at modern Jefferson Day dinners. 406
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How to Underdevelop At the end of its last session the United Nations General Assembly did a silly thing. It gave an encouraging nod to governments that nationalize "their natural wealth and resources," but didn't say that private owners must be> properly treated and reimbursed. U. S. delegate Dr. Isador Lubin quite rightly told the Assembly that its .resolution "will be interpreted by private investors as a danger signal-a warning to private investors, everywhere in the world, that they had better think twice before they place their capital in underdeveloped countries." We think the countries that backed the U.N. resolution, many of them in the "underdeveloped" category, just haven't caught up with the changed attitude of the United States. They don't seem to realize that Americans want to replace their government's foreign aid with private capital wherever possible. Even ex-Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer said during the fade-out of the Democratic Administration that "additional aid borrowings, other than military aid, can well come from private investment and the already established and operating lending agencies." Even the Truman Point Four program was supposed to be made up of both government and private investment abroad. The new Administration will certainly trim down non-military aid where private capital is available. Since 1943, American private investment abroad has about doubled; it came to nearly $12 billion by the end of 1950. If it isn't scared away, private capital would doubtless increase its contribution to economic development in other countries. The National Foreign Trade Council was quick to point out that the U.N'. resolution has two "ob-' jectionable features." First, the Council said, was its endorsement of "the right of governments to take over private property for public purposes, without prior provision for just, prompt, and effective compensation." Second, the Council objected to the suggestion that governments "establish or conduct enterprises designed to promote economic development or to carryon economic activities of a private enterprise character." The New York Stock Exchange believes the resolution will ,have "unfortunate and long-lasting effects on the free flow abroad of capital from this country." The Exchange said: "Invesltors are told, in effect, that their investments will be subject to nationalization without compensation." We like the clear-cut stand of the American delegation on the U.N.'s short-sighted resolution; a fresh breeze seems to be blowing through the corridors of the State Department. That's all to the good, because the world must realize that Americans do not approve of piracy by government that masquerades behind nationalization without proper compensation.
Germany's Dilemma By FREDA UTLEY
A noted correspondent, just back from Germany, sets forth some of the problems confronting Ithe Bonn Parliament when ratification \of the treaties with ~he Western Allies comes up before ~t [this month.
facing the Bonn Parliament is one T which even Solomon would have found hard to HE PROBLEM
solve. If it ratifies the "Contractual Agreement" and the European Defense Community" treaty, signed in Bonn and Paris at the end of May, it will be accepting the severance of Germany into two parts. If it refuses to ratify them" it will not have brought German unity any nearer, but will have denied to the West Germans the limited sovereignty, freedom, and security offered them by America, Britain, and France. Moreover, failure to ratify will appear to signify Western Germany's refusal to join our side and play her part in the defense of Europe. For few Americans are aware of the contents of the treaties and of the real reasons why there is such strong opposition to their ratification. The fact is that it is precisely because the Germans are better informed about Communism than we are that they are doubtful of the value of the treaties either to ,them or to the rest of the western world. The Germans have been through too much not to be realists. Both their experiences under Nazi rule and their intimate knowledge of Soviet Russia and of the East German "People's Republic" have taught them that no people under the heel of a totalitarian tyranny can decide its own destiny. lIenee the skepticism with which they regard the assurances given them last year by McCloy, and more recently by Dulles, that the "power of attraction" of a free, prosperous, and strong "European Atlantic Community" will lead to the reunification of Germany in "peace and freedom." This seems to them to be either foolish wishful thinking or a cruel deception. In the words of the generally respected, moderately conservative, and widely read Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "To believe all at once that the Russians would be so impressed by the appearance of a European army that they would evacuate the Soviet zone and more, and hand over the whole of Germany to the Western powers is wildly optimistic." Far from believing that the addition of some twelve German divisions to the NATO forces will so frighten the Kremlin that it will beat a hasty retreat from eastern Europe, the Germans fear that ,by signing up with the West they will "petrify" the division of Germany into two parts. It is, therefore, by no means only the Socialists who feel, like the late Dr. Schumacher, that the treaties "have been signed on the backs of some twenty million helpless Germans under Communist dictatorship,
who are starving for freedom and now see it vanish while terror is certain to increase." Since Schumacher's death last year his prophecy has been amply fulfilled, as witnessed by the mass exodus of Germans from the East zone to Berlin. It can not be denied that the treaties binding the Federal Republic to the West offer little or no hope of German reunification. By reserving to the Western occupying powers all rights "over the problems of unification and the peace settlement" they expressly forbid the West German government to negotiate with Moscow for the liberation of East Germany. At the same time they insure that West Germany's future army is to be so tightly controlled by EDC that it can never be used to liberate East Germany. Since there is obviously no chance of Germany's being reunited on terms which would be acceptable to the Kremlin and also to Washington, London, and Paris, and since NATO is pledged to a purely defensive policy, the treaties rule out German reunification. Concern for Security
Another factor which has to be taken into consideration is the mistrust engendered by the proSoviet policies of the Western Powers during the first years of the occupation. "How can we be sure," I was often asked during my recent sojourn in Germany, "that Britain and France, given the opportunity, would not take advantage of this clause in the 'Peace Contract' to Inake another bargain with Moscow at our expense?" In view of the strength of the Communists in France and Britain's sacrifice of other considerations to her desire to trade with the enemy-as exemplified in her China trade-these fears are not groundless. By our own actions we have made the Germans somewhat skeptical of our democratic professions and the ultimate aims of our policy. Having partitioned Germany in alliance with Soviet Russia, and occupied her in order to demilitarize her, we now say that we will not disoccupy her until she rearms. In the view of most Germans an end to the occupation is worth a very high price. But, they ask, is the occupation really to end, or is it in fact to be continued under a new name? The treaties not only perpetuate Allied control over Germany's foreign policy. They also severely curtail her internal sovereignty. And an "emergency clause" permits us to suspend the German Constitution adopted. in 1949 MARCH 9, 1953
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should we ever consIder there exists "a threat to the basic democratic order." Moreover, even if West Germany, once she has raised twelve divisions for European defense, can count lipon becoming free and equal to the other Western powers, has she the right, as Dr. Pfleiderer, a Free Demo'cratic Party deputy, expressed it on June 6, 1952, "to buy the freedom of fifty million West Germans at the cost of the slavery of twenty million East Germans"? Such sentiments are not universal in Germany today. Most Germans in the Federal Republic would, no doubt, agree with the popular weekly, Der Spiegel, which said: "If the treaties offered us security, we could talk about them." Having supped their fill of nationalism under Hitler, and reaped the terrible consequences, the majority of Germans today are, I think, less "nationalistic" than their conquerors. Seeing no present possibiUty of reuniting Germany, they would, in all proba'bility, be prepared to make a virtue of necessity, if the sacrifice of their "brothers in the East" ensured their own security and freedom. But as the treaties stand they not only fail to give the Federal Republic freedom and equality in the community of Western nations; they also fail to provide any hope of real security for the West Germans or the rest of Europe.
If War Comes Having themselves fought the Russians, the Germans can not imagine that an army of twenty or thirty divisions of mixed nationality could stem the onslaught of two hundred Russian divisions. Most of them agree with Carlo Schmid, the deputy leader of the Socialist Party, who said to me in Bonn: "If war comes with the Russians, then all that is being prepared to defend Europe against them is worthless." The people who defeated France so easilY,but failed to conquer Russia, have no confidence in a European army, of whatever size, in which France would play the leading role. Germany would defend France if permitted to do so. But, as the wife of ·one of the most famous anti-Nazis now in office remarked in conversation with me last December, as she looked across the tea table at her 23-year-old son: "How can I, or any German mother, feel anything but fear if my son has to serve in an army in which French divisions are depended upon for support?" All this is not to say that the Germans would refuse to serve in a European army. They would, I think, have little hesitation in following Dr. Adenauer's lead if we permitted them to mobilize their full strength for the defense of the West and for the eventual Hberation of Eastern Germany. But .they see no sense in pretending that there can ever bea real European Defense Community so long as French governments continue to dream of a German army stronger than Russia's but weaker than France's. They know that the Communist menace 408
THE FREEMAN
can be avoided only by the mobilization of the full strength of the western world, and by a positive policy in place of "containment." Thus, so long as we fail to set German energies free, there will be Germans who consider that their only hope is to come to terms with Moscow. The truly surprising fact is that there are still so few Germans prepared to follow the lead of a minority of former Nazis and Communists who want Germany to throw in her lot with Russia. But there remains a general desire to find out if there is any substance to Stalin's offer of March 10, 1952, to permit Germany to reunite, be freed of occupation forces, and have her own army for her own defense, provided she becomes a "neutral" in the East-West conflict.
Russian Temptation The temptation of the Russian offer, if it should be repeated, should not be underestimated.I,Although most Germans realize that Stalin may only be playing acat-and-mouse game, they will be inclined to examine every possibility of reuniting Germany and winning some sort of independence, so long as we refuse to treat them as full-fledged allies. There is little doubt that the great majority of Germans now want to become "good Europeans." Were we to offer "our Germans" freedom and equality in NATO and the prospect of being able to mobilize their full strength for their own defense and that of Western Europe, and for the eventual liberation of East Germany, they would have little or no hesitation in joining up with the West. To a considerable extent we are still failing to recognize fully just what adherence to the European Defense Community requires of West Germany. They must accept the division of their country; in the event of war with Russia what remains to them will, situated as it is in the very front line of the battle, surely be overrun and devastated; furthermore, the cost, added to that of occupation, constitutes more than a burden. In a word, the treaties, which Dr. Adenauer is trying so hard to get ratified, do not, in the general German view, eompensate for the sacrifices and risks which they entail. According to such newspapers as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the Bonn agreement "is based on the powers of the victors." According to the Socialist press it is "precise in defense of the rights and interests of the victors of 1945, but vague where German rights and interests come into question." The Bonn treaty gives the Federal Republic more of the shadow than the substance of sovereignty. It consists mainly of a multitude of provisions perpetuating the special privileges and rights of Western allied nationals; continuing our interference in the organization of the German economy; and insuring "the continued· validity" of past allied legislation. The "Contractual Agreement" starts off by saying in Article One that the United States, Britain,
and France are "determined to retain only those special rights of which the retention is necessary, in the common interest of the Signatory States." The following hundred pages of text make it abundantly clear that the term "common interest" covers so much territory as to discount the claim that we are restoring sovereignty, freedom, and equality to the Federal Republic. The proviso "except as provided· in the. present convention" appears on almost every page. Our "common interest" is held to j ustify our continuing interference in the organization of the German economy, either for the benefit of her British and Continental trade rivals, or to further the aims of the New Dealers in the U. S. High Commissioner's office, who long to force Germany to abandon free private enterprise. The treaty even contains a section relating to the retention of our hunting and fishing privileges, although we have graciously agreed that we shall henceforth observe German game laws. To take an instance of that "common interest" the treaty insists that the German coal, iron, and steel industry, which have already suffered so severely from dismantlement, are to be further handicapped in competition with Britain's socialized industries by being split up into small uneconomic units insuring maximum production· costs. The fact that these measures are being insisted upon under the good-sounding name of "decartelization" does not change their effect. Moreover, .West Germany has already voluntarily handicapped herself, for the sake of a Franco-German accord, by ratifying the Schuman plan, the immediate result of which is to increase German coal prices at home in order to help France's new iron and steel plants, constructed with American subsidies.
Problem of Refugees In addition to having to provide for the millions of destitute people expropriated and expelled from their homes in the East as a result of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, the Federal Republic is obligated to provide for the ever-increasing stream of refugees from all countries behind the Iron Curtain who escape into Germany. Thus the Germans are required to pay for Stalin's crimes as well as for Hitler's. The burden which this places on the able-bodied working population is enormous. Twenty-one per cent of the population of the Federal Republic exists on relief payments, or pensions, including four million wounded veterans or widows of the fallen. Many of the expellees and refugees exist on a dole of $18 a month, or even less. This is a substantial drain on the national budget. Western Allied nationals are to be exempt from such German tax burdens as the "Equalization of Burdens" law. Thus, foreign firms such as the Ford automobile company and the big U. S. oil distributors are to be given an unfair advantage over their German competitors. Nor are the heavy burdens constituted by the Western occupation forces to be substantially re-
duced. The occupiers will continue to enjoy the use of the homes and apartments, hotels, swimming pools, theaters and restaurants requisitioned seven years ago. It should her~ be noted that occu:p.ation costs have all along far exceeded the amounts which the Federal Republic has received in dollar aid. Even if one adds to the total of 1.4 billion of ECA and MSA appropriations, the earlier GARIYO relief of 1.5 billion, accounted as a debt, the total of dollar aid comes to only 3 billion, as against a 10 billion total for occupation costs. Today West Germany is no longer receiving any MSA aid but is paying occupation costs at the rate of 142.8 million dollars a month, or 1.7 billion a year. And some ren1aining counterpart funds are being used to construct spacious dwellings for State Department officials, instead of to supply housing for the millions of people living in cellars, camps, and old air-raid shelters. True, in a year's time, only part of Ger... many's "defense contribution" will be used to maintain the Western occupation forces in the luxury to which they have become accustomed. But additional taxation will also have to be imposed to pay for German rearmament. Gravest Objection The gravest of all the German objections to the treaties they are being urged to ratify is their denial of the validity of the 1949 German Constitution. The Karlsruhe Constitutional Court, established as a replica of the U. S. Supreme Court, can not maintain its function as the defender of the laws and of freedom if it ag'rees that the Western allies have the right to suspend the Constitution whenever they decide to. This is the reason why even some of Dr. Adenauer's most loyal supporters have felt compelled to oppose him on the Treaty issue. I have omitted from this article consideration of such issues as that of the "war criminals," many of whom are believed in Germany to have committed no other crime than to have taken measures against Communist partisans comparable to those we have been compelled to adopt in Korea. Nor have I touched upon other provisions of the "Peace Contract" which the Germans consider unjust, such as our confiscation of German private property abroad. The main fact is that whatever our feelings toward the Germans, and however much justification there may, or may not, have been for our original occupation policies, we have now got to face the fact that Europe can not be defended without them. And it is obviously impossible to enlist the valor and military genius and patriotism of the Germans against the Communist menace so long as we continue to treat them like prisoners on parole required to pay for Hitler's crimes for the rest of their lives. No one can deny that Dr. Adenauer's Government is anxious to co-operate with us to the fullest possible extent. We should not make it'impossible for him to retain power by refusing to recognize Germany's dilemma. MARCH 9, 1953
409
"Freedom is Slavery" By LUDWIG VON MISES
I n this down-to-earth picture of the basic facts about goods and the consumer, Dr. von Mises shows how 'lvords often get turned into their opposites.
remarkable features of our is the propensity toward changing the meaning of political terms. A semantic revolution converts the sense traditionally attached to words into its opposite. George Orwell has ingeniously described this tendency in his Nineteen EightyFour. The second of the three slogans of Oceania's Party 'says: Freedom is Slavery. In the opinion of the "progressive" intellectuals, Orwell's dictum is the talk of a hysteric; nobody, they shout, has ever ventured to 'utter such a nonsensical proposition. Unfortunately the facts belie their denial. There prevails in the writings of many contemporary authors the disposition to represent every extension of governmental power and every restriction of the individual's discretion as a measure of liberation, as a step forward on the road to liberty. Carried to its ultimate logical conclusion, this mode of reasoning leads to the inference that Socialism, the complete abolition of the individual's faculty to plan his own life and conduct, 'brings perfect freedom. It was this reasoning that suggested to Socialists and Communists the idea of arrogating to themselves the appellation liberal. Professor Robert L. Hale of Columbia University has just published a voluminous book, Freedom through Law, Public Control of Private Governing Power.* It is a passionate plea in favor of government control of business and a review of the legislation and the rulings of the courts concerning the subject. As a compilation of legal material such a book may have some merit. But the author aims at more. His ambition is to justify the policy of interventionism from the point of view of the philosophy of law as well as from that of the American constitutional and legal system. We may pass over the fact that the author entirely fails in this endeavor. For even if he had fully succeeded in proving his point, he would not have advanced any tenable argument in supp0rt of the policies he advocates. The question whether the United States should preserve the private enterprise system or should adopt what is nowadays euphemistically called direct controls is not a problem of general philosophy or of jurisprudence. It is a problem of economic policy. It has to be decided according to the effects to be expected from, or already 'brought about by, the policies concerned. Only economic considerations can clarify such issues.
O age
NE OF THE MOST
*Columbia University Press, New York, 1952; $7.50.
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THE FREEMAN
The case against interventionism is not based on the interpretation of the Constitution. (Incidentally, most of the recent interventionist measures are certainly unconstitutional.) The economists do not raise the question whether or not interventionism is legal or illegal, good or bad, desirable or undesirable. They demonstrate that the various measures of government interference with market phenomena do not produce the results aimed at 'by the governments resorting to them. These measures rather create a state of affairs which-from the very point of view of the government itself and all the advocates of interventionism-is more undesirable than the previous state of affairs which they were designed to alter. If the government, faced with this inevitable outcome, does not want to repeal its decrees and to return to economic freedom, but goes on with its interventionist policy, it must add to the first decrees more and more decrees until it has regimented every aspect of the citizens' lives, their activities in production as well as the mode of their consumption. Then any kind of freedom-economic or political-disappears, and totalitarianism of the type of the Hitler Zwangswirtschaft emerges. Interventionism is not an economic system that can last. It can not be preserved permanently. It must either be abolished or it must lead step by step to all-around planning by the government, to full socialism, a system in which nobody is free. State an Apparatus of Coercion A state or a government is an apparatus of coercion and compulsion. Within the territory that it controls, it prevents all agencies, except those that it expressly authorizes to do so, from resorting to violent action. A government has the power to enforce its commands by beating people into submission or by threatening them with such action. An institution that lacks this power is never called a government. The reasoning that leads Professor Hale to equate every business deal between private citizens with governmental coercion and to call all such transactions the exercise of private governing power runs this way: Every person has a certain amount of bargaining power on which he depends for his livelihood. Bargaining power is power to exert pressure on those with whom one carries on transactions-in other
words degree at the degree
to coerce them. Each person exerts some of coercion over other people's liberty, while same time his own liberty is subject to some of control by others.
The government says to the citizen: Pay taxes or my armed constables will imprison you. The baker says to the prospective customer: If you want me to serve you and to :bake bread for you, then you must reward me by doing something for me. In the opinion of Professor Hale there is no difference between the two modes of acting. Both are coercion, both are government of men over men, both are infringements of other people's liberty. The baker coerces the dentist by selling him bread and the dentist coerces the 'baker by filling the cavities of his teeth. Wherever you look in this worst of all thinkable worlds you discover restrictions of liberties. But fortunately paternal government steps in to salvage liberty. It saves Hberty precisely by curtailing it. For, says Professor Hale, . . . it is a fallacy to assume that every attempt by the state to control and to revise the economic results of bargaining involves a net curtailment of individual liberty. It mayor may not do so. If the liberty of those whom it restrains is less vital than the liberty which those persons would themselves restrain, then state intervention may spell a net gain in individual liberty . . . It becomes necessary at times for the political state to curtail the freedom of powerful groups to dominate.
Private Governing Power
Some years ago Mrs. X used to prepare the soup for the family meals in her own kitchen~ Later she began to buy canned soup manufactured by one of the country's canneries. A clear-headed observer will argue that the lady for some reason considers this mode of supplying her family with soup as preferable to the previous method. Not so Professor Hale. In his eyes coercion is present. The cannery, in manufacturing soup and selling it to Mrs. X, exercises governing power. As the cannery is a private firm, not a government owned and operated factory 'as in Russia, there is something highly immoral and reprehensible in the matter. For it is private governing power. And as everybody agrees. that all governing power belongs by right to the government, it is obvious to Professor Hale that the government must curtail this power of the cannery "to dominate" Mrs. X by manufacturing soup for her. The way in which Professor Hale describes the operation of the market economy is, to say the least, amazing. Thus he declares: . . . the customer can deny his money to the retailer, and by threatening to deny it can coerce the retailer to furnish him with the goods.
NoW,millions of people in this way "threaten" the jewelers of Fifth Avenue; they "threaten to deny their money to them." Yet those "threatened" do not furnish them with bracelets and necklaces. But if a hold-up man turns up and threatens the jeweler in his own manner, by brandishing a gun, the ourt-
come is different. It seems therefore that what Professor Hale calls threats and coercion comprehends two entirely different things having entirely different features and consequences. His failure to distinguish these two things from one another would be deplorable in a non-technical book. In a presumably juridical book it is simply catastrophic. It would not 'be necessary to pay much attention to Professor Hale's volume if his mode of arguing were peculiar to him alone. But these views are in fact fashionable nowadays. For instance, in the Yale Review of Spring, 1952, Professor Sutherland of the Harvard La'w School ina similar way suggested restriction of "private government." We encounter here a new slogan designed to replace the worn-out labels of the Ne'w and Fair Deals. Let us hope that this new catchword will not fool anybody.
Fast Answers In an appearance on February 18 before the Senate committee investigating the Voice of America, Howard Fast refused to say whether he is a member of the Communist Party. The answer, he asserted, might tend to incriminate him. He also refused to say whether he would fight in Korea if drafted. If anyone is in doubt what the answer would be, it may be inferred from a letter he sent recently to the French Communislt paper, L'Hum.anite, discussing the Rosenberg case. The following excerpts reveal 'his attitude to his country and to the truth, and his fidelity to the Communist party line in representing America as ruled by a Hitlerite terror. "Julius and Ethel Rosenberg have been sentenced to death as hostages for the working class and as a threat to !those who want to end American imperialist aggression in Korea. . . . The idea of legalized murder and execution of hostages is an old one in the United 'States.... Irving Saypol, who is a J ewand one of the most fanatic and hateful anti-Communists, was chosen as pros~cutor, while another anti..iCommunist, Judg'e Irving K'aufman, was chosen ,to pronounce the death sentence. Thus it can be claimed that . . . Jews have sent other Jews to their death. The old technique of the "J ewish tribunal" which Hitler used has been used again in America. . • . "What was the purpose of the trial? . . . First to stir up the mounting flames of anti-Semitism, which is a general element of the propaganda of the leaders of both American parties.... Another objective was to demonstrate that the sentence of death could be pronounced against those who believe in 'a peaceful co-existence of the U. S. S. R. and the United States.... No other case has done so much to spread terror among the American minorities. When the case broke, a cloud of fear such as I had never seen before seemed to cover the Jewish masses. Hundreds of American inte'llectuals thoug'iht they could only s'ave their. own lives by eonde'mning the Rosenbergs." MARCH 9, 1953
411
Portrait of England By HOWARD WYCE
I
awhat)s it all in aid of, that's what I 'f{JJant to know?" growls the 'man-in-the-pub in BritcUn today. In this timely and u'ntdersttmding :survey Mr., W yce tries to supply some of the 'answers. A second article will deal with literature and the arts.
dark in England today, and we walk carefully, uneasily aware that the path beneath our feet is unfamiliar. All the same, we go on; perhaps we are making a fuss about nothing, perhaps the path will, after all, lead us where we want to go. We are not children, so we're not afraid of the darkness itself. There have been far -blacker nights than this, and on such thunderous nights we managed to step out unhesitatingly, knowing our way blindfold. But now-something seems to have gone wrong with our sense of direction. Not that we are really' alarmed about thingsnot yet, anyway. The English have always had the gift of making a full meal on crumbs of comfort, with ;good-humored grumbling for a condiment, and we still manage to smack our lips with something like the old relish over such crumbs. But I don't think we have ever before cast so many envious or indignant glances at the next man's ta'ble, nor looked ,back so wistfully to feasts of the past. In the hungry night, daylight is what we all seek; and S'O far there are few gleams of it to be seen. In every facet of our living-in politics, in literature and the arts, in social organization, even in entertainment-men peer and grope and try to hope they're going the right way. Nothing is quite plain or definite any more, nothing wholly good or wholly bad. You can see this stiff-upper-lipped confusion even in so unambiguously welcome an occasion as next summer's Coronation. I remember the coronation of King George VI very well. I was a schoolboy at the time, a self-consciously calm adolescent of the type still common among our middle-class youth (though nowadays sixteen-year-old lads are judicious and lip-pursing over such things as jazz and Jean-Paul Sartre, where we had the Hitler excitements and Stephen Spender's liberalism-cum-Communism). The Coronation streets were gay with bunting; we were presented solemnly with medals and decorated mugs; people bought periscopes to see over the heads of crowds; the press was full of noble portraits of royalty and excited descriptions of the preparations. A friend and I, still busily concealing our emotions behind the traditional gentlemanly deadpan, strolled up to the West End on the night of the celebrations, skirted with astonished glances the people dancing in the street outside Ciro's, and wound up in a vast wedge of people outside Buckingham Palace. And there, tiny and glittering on T'S RATHER
412
THE FREEMAN
1. The Hungry Night
the floodlit balcony, appeared the King and Queen. Everyone rushed forward cheering, right up to the railings where red-coated sentries stood motionless; and we, losing at last our deadly calm, rushed with them, cheered with them, and went away only long after the waving couple high above us had vanished indoors, embarrassed· and grinning and exalted. It was a wonderfully happy time, that Coronation, day and night, for all Britain. If we saw storms blowing up, we never for a moment thought they might sink the ship.
The Coronation Today, our national ship leaking but not sunk, temporarily at shelter in a harbor that isn't very satisfactory but will do for the moment, we are preparing to put out the flags again for Queen Elizabeth's Coronation. We are going through the same motions as we did before. The press is crowded once again with the royal photographs. Even the stately Times bears tasteful pen drawings of Sir Hugh Casson's designs for street decorations-fairy-like structures of bells and flowers and waving standards on tall poles, Bond Street made operatic with huge crowns and herald trumpets suspended fifteen feet up along its whole length, Regent Street a bower of pink roses, and so on. Special committees are approving or rejecting traders' designs for Coronation souvenirs, Coronation pottery, Coronation stamps~ And yet ... When the time comes, no doubt we shall enjoy a sober gaiety-the sort of restrained, surprised pleasure that came upon us when first we stepped through the gates of Battersea Park, in Festival year, and found a man-made Xanadu. But for the moment sobriety predominates. Peers of the realm advertise worriedly for hired robes. A viscountess, wanting to sell her coronet and robe (presumably to some newly-rich viscountess who 'can afford to go to the ceremonies) adds the practical note: "Train converted to tea-gown also available." The Government, in a memorandum to local authorities, urges them to keep their celebration spending to "reasonable limits," and to use, for bunting and decorations, "non-traditional" materials like rayon, which will "save imported raw material." In Scotland they're still arguing, with restrained rancor, about calling the Queen "Elizabeth II." The Scottish nationalists refuse to recognize the first Eliza-
beth as a queen of Scotland, and want to call the present one "Eliza1beth I." We can't, in fact, let ourselves go with freehanded and unworried enjoyment, even on such an occasion as the coronation of a young and beautiful Queen. There's always something to spoil things, even if the spoiling is unimportant. It is, of course, more important in political and
social matters. A little while ago, for instance, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that Britain had now a surplus in her gold and sterling reserves. But just in case this should make us too happy, we were informed in the same breath that naturally this was only a temporary surplus; that some of it was due to a drainage on the European Payments Union because of our import restrictions, and we must soon feel the draft again when the other European countries stop buying our exports; that a lot more of the reserves would be eaten up in any case at the end of the year, when loan payments to the United States and Canada fall due; and so on. No hope, you see, can ever nowadays be left unqualified by some foreboding or other. Political Darkness
Politically, the darkness grows daily murkier and more baffling. The Labor Party seems determined to cut its own throat. Mr. Attlee and the respectable conservative gentlemen who support him have declared war on the fiery Bevan and his vocalists. The Bevanites used to have a monopoly on mountains manufactured out of molehills (even Mr. Churchill nowadays pursues a defense policy not terribly different from the one Mr. Bevan was demanding a year or two ago). Now Attlee and Morrison, with the outraged righteousness of worms who have turned at last, have managed to make a minor disagreement into a gulf. It seems unlikely now that Labor will displace the Tories at the next general election. The voters are no longer sure of what they're supposed to be voting for-a party that wants more socialism as soon as events make that possible (Bevan's policy), or one that wants to wait until events make it possible before going on to more socialism (Attlee's policy). So the Tories are firm and united in power? Not at all! They, too, have their split. There was some alarm and gloom among the ordinary Tory voters when Richard A. Butler was given the Treasury, and it has deepened considerably since he took over. Most rank-and-file Conservatives want the more or less complete freeing of business from controls. Butler's group are sticking firmly to the same sort of basic planning that earned the Labor Government so much hate in the City. There are more and more demands from the Government's own backbenchers for the removal of restrictions and the simultaneous cutting down of expenditure. There are more and more disapproving frowns and headshakes from a Treasury bench primly bent on pursuing its policy of cautious restriction. For us, the men in the street, there is nothing left but to shrug
and try not to seQ the latest atom-bomb headlines. As for foreign affairs, the outlook there is pitchdark. We are all, whatever our opinions, pretty sure that the road we are on is a wrong turning and probably ends in a sharp landslide. But we can't very well turn back, in case we find that someone is waiting for us round the first bend with a loaded stick. We hate the idea of rearming Germany. London, like many another British city, still has ugly wounds left from the Luftwaffe's bombing, and every bus conductor and navvy, passing those grimy waste lots, feels convinced that the bombs we hand the Germans will come home in time to make more holes. While the newspapers showed remarkable and quite uncharacteristic restraint over the painful 'business of giving the Krupps back their millions, almost every man or woman I heard mentioning it at all did so with bitterness and sick disgust. Most people, on the other hand, clearly understand the military necessity to the Allies of having a wall against Russia east of the Rhine, and would hesitate to leave Germany undefended altogether. The same resigned bafflement appears on English faces when someone says "Korea" or "Malaya" (Americans seem often to forget that we were fighting a single-handed war in Malaya long before the Korean massacre hegan-a failure, no doubt, of our public relations people). There is among us no trace at all of defeatism on these issues. British soldiers will continue to stump grumpily through bandits' jungles or tackle hostile tribesmen until they're told not to. They will continue to grunt "That's handy, that is !"when a shell falls amongst them, or call mournfully "Share that among you" as they lob a grenade. And their relatives at home will continue to accept the necessity of the temporary and sometimes permanent loss of their men with the same dourness as that with which they face our atrocious weather. But the little man in the saloon bar who shakes his head over his beer and says, "What's it all in aid of, that's what I want to know? Where's it going to stop?" receives, always, a sympathetic growl and nod from his fellow-philosophers.
T,he Crime Wave In affairs at home there is also much stumbling and cursing and flashing of lights. What our press calls "the cr,ime wave" makes the most menacing shadow. It's doubtful whether the "wave" title is justified: there always have been robberies and murders and hittings on the head (though not, in this country, too many shootings), and presumably there always will be. But certainly there seem more of them lately than we have been used to. An evening newspaper reported the other day (though with a lack of detail that makes the report a little suspect) that a local political party found difficulty in canvassing because householders were afraid of opening their doors to anyone after dark, in case they were knocked down and robbed. MARCH 9, 1953
413
My father, a kindly, slow-moving man with a naive faith in his daily newspaper (a paper, as it happens, eminently undeserving of such faith), has become so convinced by the headlines that we are all potential victims for thugs that he opened the door to me the other day "on the chain." Having recognized the inoffensive shape of his loving son, he took the chain off, shooed me in, and hastily locked the door again. I noticed, with growing astonishment, something big and brassy gleaming in his left hand, which he held bashfully behind his back. It turned out to be an antique brass pestle, heavy and unwieldy; and he told me, with a boyish pleasure in the game, that he always seized this up from its decorative brass mortar in the hall and held it ready to strike as he opened the door!
"Come on, You Coppers" This, of course, is sheer play-acting on my father's part, though he and my mother take it seriously enough. Crossing the road is still far more dangerous, in modern Britain, than opening your front door to a stranger. But it remains true that in three years violent crimes (including rape and sexual assault) have increased in number by more than a third. And, what seems even more important, the offenders' average age is getting less all the time. There was an appalling case the other day in which a sixteen-year-old boy shot one policeman dead and wounded another. He did it shouting, "Come on, you coppers ! You gave my brother twelve years, ,now come and get me!" (a melodramatic piece of nonsense that seems directly derived from cheap ,films). In the face of this problem of young criminals, all, sorts of suggestions, both wildly silly and soberly applicable, are being thrust forward. The wildest is also the most widespread, that corporal punishment, which was inflicted for armed robbery and robbery with violence until 1948, when it was abolished, should be reintroduced. At least six times this year in the House of Commons, 'and twice in the House of Lords, Government spokesmen have pointed out that these particular crimes have actually been reduced in number since the use of whipping was abolished, and that it seems pretty foolish, therefore, to claim that the lash was a more effective deterrent than imprisonment. News editors, eager to give their readers the narcotic of vicarious brutality, manage consistently to ignore these facts and figures. The newspaper with the biggest circulation of the sensational Sunday papers ran an article the other day calling for the whip's return, and decorated the paragraphs with little drawings of crossed whips and birches.. Regrettably, most judges' have added their dry legal tones to the clamor. In the middle of all the pother, the unarmed British bobby plods staidly round his beat, earning universal respect and not much else. Wages and conditions in 0ur police' forces are still wretchedly inadequate, and a lot of' intelligent .comment is now 414
THE FREE'MAN
being directed to this, with demands for improiVe.;., ments that will attract fresh men into our badhr understaffed force. Beneath the trivial or serious instances of lawlessness that daily leap at us from our newspaperS'?, a moral lies that not many of us seem yet to have~ learnt. Thirteen years ago, war whistled down upom our heads, and blasted family life out of its home., Our crime problems of today began with the first bomb on Britain. That bomb brought a flood of regulations and orders that washed away the ordinary citizen's rough-and-ready knowledge of the law and left him floundering. You had only to let a draft twitch your black-out curtain to be committing an offense. You needed only to accept the gift of a friend's clothing coupon to be liable for prosecution. It became impossible, in short, to respect the law completely; there was just too much of it to cope with. It was in those unhappy years that the figure of the racketeer, the black-market crook, the smuggler, the spiv,' became romantic, a focus for a grudging admiration, the daredevil rapscallion who gaily defied all those tedious rules that made our respectable lives a misery. And it was in that crook-glamorizing period that our motherless and fatherless children grew up in their haphazard evacuation homes. The Habit of Petty Offenses Thirteen years later the British, who used to be the most law-abiding people in the world, have developed the habit of committing petty offensesbuying the odd half-pound of black-market butter; falsifying their income-tax returns (our contribution to Western defense imposes on us a more penal load of tax per head than any other nation has to suffer) ; paying a stranger at a street-corner for nylons they can guess were stolen. Only the other day the headmistress of one of our best, and certainly one of our most expensive, girls' schools told an old pupil that for the first time in all the years she had been at' the school she had had to give the girls a lecture on elementary honesty. She added hopelessly that· it was of course the parents who ought to have had the lecture, but they were un-get-at-able. If this is the effect of postwar materialism on our wealthiest and most respected families, the effect of poorer and more desperate parents' moral slovenliness on their young can be understood. The "crime wave" would not have happened, I'm quite sure, if there had been no war in 1939; nor would it be happening today if, having had a war, we had still managed to retain our faith in moral values. But we haven't. Any working-class district today bristles with television masts; few co'ntain' a house with a Bible in it. There is our sickness laid bare; and the course of the sickness is clearly charted in our literature and arts.
This is the first of two articles by
Mr~
Wyce.
Holland's Heroic Achievement By MARTIN EBON
In this behind-the-news story Mr. Ebon shows how the \Dutch, )because of ,their p:olicy o/encouraging private industry, find
the,mselve,8 in fa strong
position to cope with the recent disastrous floods.
Holland is teaching the world a lesin self-reliance. Once again the traditional Dutch characteristic of calm tenacity is being pitted against enormous odds. Dike against flood, construction against destruction-those are the symbols of Holland's remarkahle will to sur-, vive. Here is a nation that has suffered well over a thousand deaths, that has sustained more than a. quarter billion dollars worth of damage, that is faced with the loss of over 300,000 acres of farm-, land-and that says, in the matter-of-fact manner of August G. Maris, Netherlands D-irector General of Waterways: "The next full harvest' can be expected in 1955." They are already thinking in terms of 1955, and beyond. They are already preparing the gypsum that will neutralize the salt which violent floods have spread over the rich brown Dutch earth~ They are busy repairing dikes, draining the soil, and making plans to prevent a repetition of the disastrous flood of 1953. This, in detail, is the damage the Netherlands suffered as a result of the flood that hit the nation during the first days of February: 1,395 dead;, nearly 70,000 people made homeless; close to six per cent of the country's cultivated land flooded; 144,000 head of livestock and horses lost to the merciless sea. The February disaster hit the Netherlands barely one week after the nation announced that it would be able to do without $15 million in dollar aid under the United States Mutual Security Program. "This action," Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had said, "which is in the best Dutch tradition of self-reliance, deserves the admiration of the American people." 'The same approach which enabled the Netherlands to go without this' dollar aid is now being used in repairing the flood damage, putting the country back in order, and going about the nation's business. To study this approach, we have to go back to the spring of 1951. It was then that the Dutch decided they didn't like the looks of their country's economy. Just about two years ago, the Netherlands found Use1-! suffering from a global economic disease: prices were high; wages were' rising; inflation was mounting. But the Hollanders, in response to these, conditions, did not follow the line of least resistance. They did not tighten controIs on wages
O son
NCE AGAIN
and prices. They did not establish new government agencies, clamoring for the taxpayer's money and eager to found control empires of their own. No, the Dutch did the exact opposite. They decided to relax controls and free prices. The results were apparent within one year. While, during the first half of 1951, the Netherlands imported nearly thirty per cent more than it, sold abroad, by early 1952 its exports exceeded imports. From March, 1951 to March, 1952, the Netherlands reserves of gold and foreign exchange rose from 1.3 billion to 2.2 billion guilders. Although controls were reduced and prices largely permitted to find their own level, the cost of living index hardly moved during the twelve-month period.
The Turning Point How did this happen? Well, the government, for one thing, decided to get out of much of the industry and building field. After the war, ambitious plans for plant development and building were advanced by various cabinets. This increased inflationary pressures. When the turning point came in early 1951, the Dutch government stimulated private business to do its best, while cutting its own expenditures in these fields by one-fourth. The deflationary policies initiated in early 1951 caused a reduction in the buying of domestically produced goods. This might have led to unemployment. And, as the Netherlands has a relatively small land area, its non-farm labor force is constantly growing. The employment crisis reached its peak in January, 1952. The number of unemployed at that time rose to 175,000. Would the government seek to reduce this figure by inflationary measures? Would the carefully planned come-back boomerang? But natural economic laws caused the unemployment pendulum to drop back. By last N 0vember it was down to less than 130,000. Although not all the figures for 1952 are in by this time, we know for certain that Dutch recovery continued along the same lines. Exports during the year had almost completely covered imports. By year's end, the Nethetlands had accumulated a $525 million surplus in its international paym~nts balance. 'Its total foreign exchange and gold reserveg amounted to more. than 3.3 billion guilders. Comparing even the improved early 1952 figures with those available at the beginning of 1953, we see an impressive further strengthening of the Dutch MARCH 9, 1963
415
economic position. The picture is yet more definite in view of the irremediable loss the Netherlands had suffered as a result of the war. As described recently by Emma Doran in the Journal of Commerce, these included "wartime devastation, loss of the greater part of her colonial empire, her limited natural resources and her large imbalance in trade with the United States."
Repair and Rebuild Just before the flood hit the Netherlands, the administration at The Hague was beginning to relax restrictions on house building and public works projects. But, on February 11, Premier Willem Drees was compelled to declare that because of reconstruction expenditures brought about by the flood, the government must temporarily reduce its industrial investment program and cancel projected tax cuts. The task at hand now is to repair and to rebuild. But the pattern is familiar; it is: to face a crisis, to deal with it, and go on to something else. Can the Netherlands overcome the terrific setback which it has suffered as a result of the flood? Right now the Dutch act as if such a question did not exist at all. They are dealing with first things first. They have definite armament commitments under the European Army Program. There has been no suggestion from The Hague that this program will be slowed down. The Dutch, rebuilding their flood-devastated countryside, can fall back on wartime experiences. During World War Two, the flooding of Walcheren Island opened 38,000 acres to the onrushing sea. The moment the armistice was signed on May 8, 1945, Dutch engineers began their work of rebuilding. At that time, cautious experts said it might take up to nine years before crops would grow again on the salty soil. The new Walcheren Island dikes were actually ready by January 1, 1946. And at the end of 1948, nearly all the Walcheren land was again producing crops. The flood of February, 1953, represents a greater and more difficult job. Nature has been even more devastating than man in wartime. The job is enormous, and it will draw energy, manpower, and resources away from the splendidly rehabilitated Dutch economy. When all is said and done, the Dutch are not miracle men. They represent, in the world of rambunctious talk and destructive hostilities, a rather old-fashioned picture of common sense and hard work. Premier Drees, ten days after the flood disasters, reassured the world: "Our national life is going· on, our harbors are open, our transport is working, our industry is ready to fulfill orders." The Dutch, once again, were on the job.
Americans mobilized relief for the flood-stricken Netherlands literally within hours of the disaster news from Holland. Those 'Wish~ng to do so may send their donations directly to : Holland Flood Relief, Box 300, New York 5, New York. 416
THE FREEMAN
II
THIS IS WHAT THEY SAID
I
Huge, Inverted Pyramids If we do not halt this steady process of building commissions and regulatory bodies and special legislation like huge inverted pyramids on every one of the simple Constitutional proyisions, we shall soon be spending many billions of dollars more. FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT,
Radio Speech,
March 2, 1930
Slightly Misquoted Arthur Krock (Times) says in effect: Sen. Taft didn't mean what he thought he wrote he meant "'Then he wrote that it was "incredible" that Ike appointed Mr. Durkin Labor Secretary as it would have been if Ike had appointed Mr. Acheson or Senators McCarran, Jenner, or McCarthy. (The Press in the Nation), New York Post, Jan. 15, 1953
DEXTER TEED,
Stalin's Concessions I don't agree that Stalin at Yalta was ruthless. Stalin gave away a great many things; indeed one of the most moving things about the Y'alta Conference was that, at the height of Russian . . . n1ilitary power, a height that has never been equalled in the history of the world, Stalin went into a conference dedicating himself and his country to use that power for the establishment of international peace. Town Meeting of the Air, February 15, 1945
RAYMOND SWING,
Tough on the Nerves In retrospect it is manifest that we have not gone backward but are slowly and jerkily inching forward. This period was bound to be full of shock to many Americans at the moment far removed in spirit from the deep inner torments seizing mankind. For what we have been witnessing from afar is the carpentry of a new world, "where a revolution is being completed," as Jan Masaryk said the other day, "which began a hundred years ago in France" [Le., in 1848]. It is going to last a long time yet and for the American people it is bound to be tough on the nerves. EDGAR SNOW,
in Stalin Must Have Peace,
1948
Senatorial Poetics, Consistency, thou fascinating jewel of sophisticated humbuggery, loquacity, and confusion, cease, oh cease to lead illustrious and irrepressible windbags astray by the blinding and bewildering light of thy "alluring ray." HON. MATTHEW M. NEELY, in the Congres8ional Record, Nov. 14, 1951
The American Disease An Irish Opinion of a few thousand mystics who live on the Bowery, all Americans believe religiously in holding a precise working job up to the moment they collapse of heart disease. Indeed, the average American looks upon heart disease and other rapid killers as friendly visitors; they release him cleanly and efficiently from the fear of ever finding himself out of a job-or, worse still, being forced to contemplate the life he has led. Whether an American has a million dollars or nothing at all, he feels the necessity of working. Work for him is not a me'ans of living life more intensely but rather a convenient, if perverse, method of escaping from it. If you ask a wealthy American why he continues to work, he will at first look at you in astonishment and wonder whether you are trying to imply that he is on the verge of death or whether you have plans for grabbing his job. What other possible reason could you have for asking him? That you might possibly want to talk to him for. the sake of relaxation or stimulation is outside hiscomprehension. He is continuously trying to figure out your angle. He is 'certain that everyone has an angle. If you 'are able to allay his suspicions and ask him again why he continues to. work, he will probably tell you that he only intends to work for another year or two to make absolutely certain that he will have enough money to cover every contingency when he retires to his dream. He always has a dream and he's always planning to fulfill that dream in a year or two. But the dream is never fulfilled and, up to the moment of his sudden death, up almost to the moment he is being pumped full of em'balming fluid, he is still hanging on to his job. Work is the essence of life to him, its sole purpose. To work until he drops dead is his ideal. l\lfaking money is of secondary importance, because the American, contrary to a prevalent notion, is most generous \vith his money. Money is merely a tangible proof that he is on the job~ And he is lTIOst delighted with himself when he is working hardest. He is intrigued with himself because he feels that he has figured out an angle to beat the rap 'which God has imposed on humanity. God decreed that because of his disobedience man should be compelled to work: the American has succeeded in convincing, himself that this was not a penalty at all. "O.K., O.K.," he 'Seems to say, "God says that I must work. So what? I like work! God Himself is only doing his job like the rest of us." WITH THE EXCEPTION
By PETER KAVANAGH
Work being for the American not The Great Curse but rather a great virtue, it follows that there is no such thing for him as a menial job. The vapor surrounding the head of the man who is down in a hole fixing a sewer is to him a nimbus as angelic as that around the head of a business executive. He is out of bed in his suburban home at six-thirty in the morning. He has his coffee and orange juice, is driven quickly to the railroad station by the wife and catches a train for the city. He is in his office at nine. Here his meek and henpecked domestic attitude is cast aside with his coat, and he stands there in his shirt sleeves and suspenders ready to busy himself sedulously with matters of the utmost insignificance until he takes the train home at five o'clock in the evening. He bickers with the wife until bedtime, and so his day ends successfully: he has not reflected or contemplated for a moment.
Passion for Work One of the results of this passion for work is that America has by her own dynamic energy built herself into a position of power and wealth comparable to the England of Elizabethan times. But she has advanced so far on the material level that the law of diminishing returns is beginning to work against her. She is compelled to give much of her hard-earned gains away if she is to sustain her policy of work for work's sake. There would be consternation in America if no one would take her surplus wealth! What could the ordinary person do with his time if 'by working no more than one day a week he could still 'afford the usual luxuries? Luckily, there is little danger of such a situation arising at the moment when Europe and even Asia are so willing and kind as to accept America's surplus wealth. And if both these continents renege, America can always count on Africa. Other 'wealthy countries in other times solved this problem by establishing a leisured class who adopted the concept of the elegant gentleman.Having acquired or inherited the excess wealth of the country, they espoused the notion that work, especially manual work, was undignified and decided that they would live gracefully; hard work was for people with strong backs and thick heads. It was from such a situation as this that the Greek, the Florentine, and the Elizabethan cultures evolved. This may be the answer to America's problem. MARCH 9, 1953
417
There is no evidence that people were less happy then than they are now. On the contrary, they seem to have been remarkably happy, as they well might be in an age that produced so many beautiful and ennobling things. The mass of Americans are naturally somewhat fearful of a cultural renaissance because their whole attitude towards living would be jeopardized. They don't 'want to be wakened from their coma, to have their idol shattered, their drug of hard work taken from them. Yet in spite of all, there is a genuine demand in America to release the imagination, to stretch out toward something more sath;fying than the present barren routine. The Communists, because they were alert, sensed this need and tried to fill it by organizing a pseudo-intellectual coterie of superficial thinkers-but brazen and efficient propagandists. Most conservative Americans were too busy working on the job to pay much attention to this. It is difficult at the moment to visualize a section of the American public in sufficient repose to permit of a literary flowering. Such a movement will hardly originate with the politicians, because politicians have always suffered from congenital unawareness, an occupational disorder also of the press. There is still less hope in the universities, because in America professors spend most of their energies worrying over the problem of tenure. Gamblers and racketeers have much to recommend them as the patrons of a vital American culture, but their activities are so restrained by penal laws that it is unlikely they will emerge as the American Medici. The unfortunate truth seems to be that Americans will go right on allowing their souls to be dried out, and only perhaps from a great catastrophe could there emerge the agonized cry of the heart which is the sign of active and intense growth.
I1_ _
I
W_O_R_T_H_H_E_A_RI_N_G_AG_A_I_N_ _1
Advice to :England "The Vital interests should render Great Britain the earnest and unyielding opponent of the Russian projects of annexation and aggrandizement. . . . Having come thus far on the way to universal empire, is it probable that this gigantic and swollen power will pause in its career? . . . With the Albanian coast she is in the very center of the Adri~tic It would appear that the natural frontier of Russia runs from Danzig or perhaps Stettin 'to Trieste. And as sure as conquest follows conquest, and annexation follows annexation, so surely would the conquest of Turkey by Russia be only the prelude for the annexation of Hungary, Prussia, Galicia, and the ultimate realization of the Slavonic Empire. The arrest of the Russian scheme of annexation is a matter of the highest moment. In this .instance the interests of . democracy and of England go hand in hand." KARL MARX,
New York Tribune, April 12,
1853.
A Long View The American struggles against the natural obstacles which oppose him; the adversaries of the 'Russian are men. The former combats the wilderness and savage life; the latter, civilization with all its weapons and arts. The conquests of the one are gained by the ploughshare; those of the other by the s'word. The American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends, and gives free scope to the unguided actions and common sense of the citizens. Their starting point is different, their ends are not the s'ame; yet each of them seems marked by Heaven to sway half the globe. COUNT DE TOCQUEVILLE,
De11tOCracy in A mer-
ica, 1833
Spring Music In Winter So early, so eager For blossom the pear tree; So surly and meager Its ration of spring! And a bronze-breasted robin Now clings to the bare tree, And sings of some carefree Intemperate thing.
1833
It Happened Before In Rome there was more awful cruelty. . . . The rewards of the informers were no less hateful than their crimes; for some, gaining priesthoods and consulships as spoils, others, obtaining positions as imperial agents and secret influence at court, robbed and ruined without limit, inspiring universal hatred and terror. Slaves were corrupted against their maSiters, freedmen against their patrons; and those who had no enemy were crushed by their friends. EMMA GRAY TRIGG
THE FREEMAN
It is not necessary to my happiness that I should sit in Parliament; but it is necessary to my happines's that I should possess, in Parliament or out of Parliament, the consciousness of having done what is right. THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY,
The heart is too fearful, The mind far too wary To trust oblique AprilThe bird may be wrong. But sing, heedless robin, And bare branches, hurry To bloom white and airy, Believe· in the song!
418
One Man's Happiness
TACITUS,
Histories, I, II
New Facts on Katyn From a former Soviet rColonel comes this rvivi4, By VASILY YERSHOV
spectacular story of the killer Borisov, who boasted of the hundreds fof Polish officers he had shot tat Katyn and rdescribe,d the details.
Borisov's acquaintance, he was WSMERSH commander in the division in which HEN I MADE
I was serving as lieutenant colonel. SMERSH is a name invented during the war for the NKVD sections in the army. The term NKVD was so unpopular that the government thought it advisable to replace it by a more patriotic term, and the new name SMERSH (Smer,t Shpionam, meaning Death tofue Spies) seemed to be more in line with the military situation. Actually, its main job was to spy on the officers and soldiers. Borisov was SMERSH commander in our division. It was his duty to see that the orders of SMERSH and of the military tribunals, and especially death sentences, were carried out. Captain Borisov came from a good middle-class family. His father was a schoolteacher, his elder sister a physician in a Moscow polyclinic. Borisov himself also went to college. He was studying for an engineering degree at the Institute of Electrical Engineers. When he was in his fourth term, the Party ordered him to give up his engineering studies and go into a different field of study, to prepare himself, in short, for work in State Security organs. During the first months his new studies, which had to be kept a strict secret, did not appeal to him very much, but, gradually, he said, he felt the increasing need of devoting himself entirely to this new life and work. He enjoyed the feeling of superiority resulting from his special position. "It is impossible to explain the happiness you feel when the highest authorities openly tell you that you, the Borisovs, are that particular organ in the state apparatus which is in charge of controlling everyone and all. The true revolutionaries are nort those who make a revolution," Borisov used to say, "but those who protect the revolution!" Having lived for several years in this atmosphere, Borisov understood the situation better than the others. He believed that in order to devote himself entirely to his job, he had no right to marry and raise a family. For him nothing existed but his particular "job." I once witnessed a public execution attended by several hundred persons (in the beginning of the war it was customary to carry out the executions of deserters and other criminals in thepre'sence of the entire staff). Borisov, who was the executioner, hardly waited until the prosecutor had finished his short speech before shooting the "criminal" with savage avidity in the back of
the head. The "criminal" fell dead to the ground, but, obviously, Borisov had not yet had all the satisfaction he wanted-he bent down and put another three bullets into the victim. Once I saw him setting two dogs on a naked man. They were tearing him to pieces, while Borisov kept repeating: "Confess, scoundrel, confess." The longer the torture lasted, the more excited he grew in preventing the victim from defending himself against the attacking dogs. It is an honor, he used to say, to shoot scoundrels sentenced to death by a court or on order of the highest authorities. Therefore, he often would not permit his colleagues to carry out the executions but used himself to shoot several persons, one after the other. To yield the victim to another hangman was, in his view, a failure to perform an honorable mission entrusted to him by the authorities. Yet perhaps for Borisov, too, killing had its limitations. . . .
Vodka Ration I made Borisov's acquaintance and met him regularly because I was quartermaster of my division, and that meant that I was also in charge of the vodka supply. It was impossible to buy vodka in the army: it was issued only on order, and it was my job to 'write out these orders. Borisov came often to get his vodka ration, and he was sometimes entitled to very considerable rations. According to Soviet rules, a commander and each of his men are entitled to 200 gr. (7.2 ounces) of vodka before an execution and 400 gr. (14.4 ounces) after the execution. These rules had been laid down as the result of a careful and thorough study. The executioner was given vodka before the execution so that he should not lose his nerve and refuse to do his job at the last moment, but not so much as to impair his marksmanship. After the execution, however, he needed a good rest and therefore received a double ration. Borisov always came himself to fetch his vodka from the storehouse; he did not entrust this job to anyone. When getting his ration from the storekeeper, he always begged for an additional glass of vodka. There were many executions, especially during the initial period of the war, and Borisov was poisoning himself with vodka to such an extent that eventually he could not do without it even for an hour. Once, late at night, he came to beg me MARCH 9, 1953
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for vodka, without any reason and without being entitled to any ration. He looked miserable and unhappy like a child begging his mother for a piece of candy. "Do me a favor, chief," he said, "and give me some vodka. I can't go to sleep without it, and if you don't give it to me, I'm going to die on the spot." I must confess I was somewhat embarrassed. "I must tell you, chief," he went on, "that I would have been dead long ago if it weren't for vodka. I always keep a bottle next to my bed and before going to sleep I have a drink. Two hours later, I wake up like a raving madman. In my dreams I see the most horrible things. I see all those I've shot. They make faces at me and jeer at me. Some of them have holes in their heads, with fresh blood dripping from the holes, as though I had just shot them. They throw lassos at me and strangle me. They dance before my eyes. When I can't ,stand it anymore, I wake up and feel as though I were going crazy. I am so exhausted by these nightmares that I can hardly reach for the bottle. When I've had a drink, I feel better and go back to sleep. But an hour or two later" the whole thing starts all over again. I haven't a drop of vodka left, and I'm afraid of going to bed. That's why I came here to ask you to help me."
Spring, 1940 In the fall of 1944, our division was stationed in the region of Malkino-Gurno in Poland. Borisov came, as usual, to get his vodka ration. That particular day he had executed four Red Army soldiers sentenced to death by the Military Tribunal. He sat down idly, and -began reminiscing about the wonderful time he had had-which "was probably gone forever"-in the spring of 1940. "You know, chief," he told me, "you are feeding me drops, but if you just figure it out you will see that even sticking strictly to the rations I and my 12-man platoon emptied hundreds of bottles in April, 1940, and it was not even a full month. We shot over 400 Polish pany (gentlemen) in Katyn. We had a major there, he was really the right guy. He gave us as much vodka as we wanted. He was not stingy like you." And that is how I first learned about the Polish officers at Katyn, and what happened to them. The "major" Borisov referred to was Vetoshnikov, chief of the vas,t "Special Camp No.1" near Smolensk where the Polish officers captured by the Red . Army in September, 1939, when the Soviet government occupied and annexed eastern Poland, were held. There were "thousands of them," Borisov told me. In April Vetoshnikov ordered him and his platoon to execute a large number of them. O,ther NKVD groups were assigned also to take part in the full operation of killing off the Poles. The executions took place only during the night, starting at- a:bout ten o'clock. "We worked in teams of three," Borisov described it. "In order that the shots should not be heard, we led the men in groups 420
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of ten into a deep dugout where we shot them. When the first ten -were finished, ten others were brought in and another shooting team took over. After that other soldiers came in to carry away the dead and to put them into a common grave. Then we went home, got drunk like hell and went to bed. At that time, I was still in good health, I could shoot ten men all by myself and was never plagued by bad dreams." "You must understand," Borisov went on, "that I have been very useful to our government. We have not only liquidated the Polish bandits in Katyn but, assisted by my platoon, I also liquidated during the war 465 deserters, spies and enemies of the people. To such a man you measure vodka with a teaspoon." A Further Confirmation Later I had another opportunity to hear Soviet officers talk about the Katyn executions. It was shortly after Marshal Rokossovsky had destroyed several Polish villages. Among these officers was the SMERSH chief of the fifteenth mechani,zed division, Lieutenant Colonel Iliasov. One of the officers expressed the view that it might be difficult to trust the Poles in a future war because they might turn against us. But Iliasov reassured us. He said: "In general, one should not trus1t anyone. But, as far as the Poles are concerned, we have 'calmed' them. If necessary, we shall organize another Katyn and prevent them from doing any harm." We were dumbfounded when we· heard him say "organize another Katyn." Each of us thought that Iliasov was trying to put us to the test and to provoke us. But we were mistaken. In spite of our silence, Iliasov went on to tell us a number of details ahout the killings at Katyn which coincided with what Captain Borisov had told me. Re confirmed that the officers were shot in a deep dugout. He somehow even knew that the dugout still existed in the Katyn forest. . . .
Neighborhood Witch The children made themselves at home With little piles of leaves and loam Upon her well-swept steps-yet she Withheld her broom and let them be. They were too young to shoulder blame, Too young to mock her, call her name In taunting tones. She let them be, Reserving her. asperity To use against the older others, Their rude, impertinent, school-age brothers, vVho were themselves too young to know How porcupine a soul can grow, Frustrated, lonely, and adept At keeping everything well-swept. SJANNA SOLUM
Arts and Entertainments Cinerama-A Third Dimension
It is perhaps odd in this early day of the atom that the largest single' human enterprise, moneywise, in America is neither science, nor manufacturing, nor farming, nor commerce, but the giants of entertainment and communication. The modern "mass media," as they are called-radio, television, Hollywood, the mass magazines, the newspapers, the book publishers, the record and recording companies. To which one may add, their cousins and occasional bedfellows-the telephone, the wireless" the telegram. It is odd, too, that these giants of our day are purveyors of no solid product, but of a thing as insubstantial as the word, the idea, ART. The mind follows easily the drama and meaning in the detonation of the A bomb, in the speed of the jet, ibut the mind. grows slowly, and imperceptibly, into the use and habit of its art. It comes usually as a toy,and grows only by steps into society. We can remember, many of us, when radio was an amalteur'.s "bug" and hobby, when the movie was the sideshow nickelodeon at the penny arcade, when the victrola was a parlor game for courting couples, when television was, with greenheaded monsters, the stock in trade of the fantasy fiction writer, when the photograph was a quick fading and long-time-in-the-taking souvenir for the family album. Today these have grown into RCA-Victor, NBC and CBS, MGM and 20th Century-Fox, Kodak, Life magazine, and a thousand others. This byway of introducing another child of the arts, hardly fully born, yet already tumbling in unbelievable millions of dollars and squalling pitifully to be recognized as an adult-especially in the offices of stockbrokers and at meetings of boards of directors. It is called by many names, Cinerama, "3 D" or three dimension, Cinemascope, tri-opticon, stereo techniques, Natural Vision, and a dozen others. Cinerama and "3 D" are the basic two, and are different processes both to the eye and to the mant!lfacturer. The rush to tri-dimensional motion pictures began in late 1952 with the success at the ibox office (purely as a novelty) of Cinerama, a sort of threedimensional travelogue. Cinerama is not threedimensional on the screen, but three-dimensional in the theater as it surrounds the eye and ear of the spectartor. For it is a psychological rather than a visual effect seeming to surround one by sight and sound. The Cinerama principle is this. In the ordinary movie the screen is almost square, and like a photograph you hold in your hand it is flat and framed
tight by its rigid shape and borders. The sound and music blare forth over the heads of the audience from behind the screen at the front of the theater. In Cinerama, however, both sound and sight are torn loose. Loudspeakers are placed in front, Ibehind, and at the sides of the theater. And the image is no longer small and easily seen at a glance, but large and wide, spilling over at the sides, and pushing higher and lower than the old screen. Looking at the screen of Cinerama you have not, as in the standard film, the impression of looking through a .window upon an action. Rather you have the sense of sitting in the open, unencumbered by walls. It is a little like being in the open nose of a plane, in the prow of a ship, on the cow-catcher of a train, or in the first row center of a theater. And it is these obvious and gross effects that the first show of Cinerama dramatizes. The sound aids this illusion of depth, sounds emanating from in front striking us from the forward speaker, sounds coming from right or left coming to right or left ear, and sounds from the rear coming at us from the rear.
Trouble and Virtue The trouble and virtue in all this is that its three-dimensional effect is created acoustically and mechanically 'by Ii terally surrounding the eye and ear. Trouble because the unfortunate person in the back of the theater may hear only the less important noises from that rear loudspeaker blaring in his ear, while someone with a seat midtheater left will hear prim'arily the string section of the orchestra, the 'brass sounding too distant at the right. This is an approximation to reality a little too close for either enjoyment or art. 'Theaters and sound installations mus,t be specially engineered for it. In "3-D" the third dimension is created not in the theater but visually in the planes of the image on the screen, as it is in the old-fashioned stereoscope, where a tree seems to stand out froIn a mountain in the 'background, and a valley seems to be actually an empty space 'between foreground and the horizon. The effect of a good "3-D" system is as startling as that of Cinerama, which uses a flat image on a curved screen. To date "3-D" has had none but inferior show-shop pieces created for it, with the cumbersome problem of picaresque glasses, polaroid or colored, to be worn by the audience not yet solved. Philosophically Cinerama poses a fascinating and profound problem for the arts, one that has not MARCH 9, 1953
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yet been discussed or approached, yet one that is of more importance than the simple psychological effect of depth. Just as the early film, intrigued with the fact that it could show motion, sold nothing hut motion for years, so we can expect, first, and for years, from Cinerama, pictures of the wide air and heavens, of the gigantic scope of mountains and the plunging valleys (with, of course, the rising sport and heroics of mountain climbing), of the crisscrossing tides and traffic in the depths of the sea, of the angular 'and pictorial complexity of city streets, of the great encompassing horizon -almost as though these were new facts of learning, new dimensions of reality. What the "drama" of speeding trains and running horses were to the old film, instituting the genre of the Western and the detective story chase, the great out-of-doors will be to the new medium, producing glorified cineramatic adventure stories of the world's spaces and places. And since Cinerama is panoramic, it will have a heavy and early tendency toward a sentimentalization of nature.
Language of the Film But the art of the film is not in the obvious, in pretty pictures or wide sight. It is in the new methods it creates for a realistic, and symbolic, interpretation of the human drama. It was because of the time and effort of the old artists of the film (Griffiths, Eisenstein, etc.) that a movie method of telling 'a tale was developed, shattering old theatrical and stage styles of acting and writing, of emphasizing a detail, of presenting the inner life of a character, of telling us about reality or about simultaneous actions going on and building toa climax. This "language of the film" was technical, but its insights were profoundly philosophical, and affected the novel, the poetry, even the stage of our time. These were the close-up, the montage and tricks of the cutting room (with flashbacks and the interlacing of complex actions), and the free moving camera and pan. An isolated clenched fist, in close-up, became as vivid a clarification and step 'in the narrative as a grandiose gesture on the stage had ibeen. Here it was the director as artist, saying as much as the actor. Cinerama offers a new, deep, and 'broadening power to our visualization. With the wide screen, for instance, it is possible now to play a highly dramatic scene centered, say, in the room of a hotel, and have at the right the casual, slow procession of persons. in the hall, and at the left a section of the more complex life of a city street, all on the screen at once. In a detective story, the police can roll· up !by c'ar at the left, while the main scene plays itself out in the center, and then barge in from the hall at the right. What was done on the old screen :by montage and cutting from room, to street, to room, to hall, in separate shots, is now simultaneous. The same drama, but a wider concept, a wider presentation of its reality. To the serious dramatist this "peripheral" vision 422
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becomes, though at first a difficulty, a new technique and a new language. Where the old tight screen allowed you to frame and to focus and to compose with economy, now the camera will stage and choose and cast and interweave its peripheral edges. "Simultaneity" becomes as much a technique as montage, and becomes at once a conscious and theoretical concept, to be used and overused by the novelist, the poet, as well as by the Cinerama filmwriter. So a mechanical technique gives rise to new aesthetic concepts, and the public by indirection takes a new vision of life. Postscript: To add a touch of fantasy: The bewildering list of technical innovations facing the modern, if we dare call him, devotee of the arts, makes his world seem a satire torn from Gulliyer's Travels, silly and cruel, with all of Swift's incredible details of a fantastic and dotty society. The public, for instance, has today two kinds of radio, AM and FM; five kinds of reaording-wire, tape, and three different speeds for the disks; some ten systems for home amplification; four kinds of movie, black-white, technicolor, cinerama, "3 D"; two kinds of television, the black-white showing and the three color systems now being worked on, one of which will be introduced. And more. And there are madcaps and hobbyists and publicity men hollering an exclusivity in each. The latest to come is a system whereby a full movie, sound and dialogue and image, is recorded on a tape recorder, on a single strip of opaque cellophane tape magnetized on one .side to retain an electromagnetic impression. This piece of cold blank cellophane is unscrambled and plays back the full movie-images, dialogue, and music. Bing Crosby is preparing one of his TV shows in this way. To follow this development to some ultimate. It is entirely conceivable that one day the nation will be brought to ruin by an espionage agent who has a wire-thread recording of the country's top secret, whatever that is, sewn in as the stitching of his six-plus jacket. And this magnetized thread recording will be a full, three dimensional, cineramatic, technicolor, sound and dialogue picture treatment of the subject. An imaginative tale in which all the complex arts of a society will be sewn into a garment by that old and simple craft of the tailor, and by a simple needle. And pity the F,BI looking for such work of art. For, in whatever sense, art it is. And if the spy, as he should, has a fitting sense of the irony, he will end the thread thunderously with music, with the spirited national anthem of his country. This "disappearance of the art object" is the opposite end, I suppose, of that first process when a work of art was created by hand to be seen, at once, by the eye; or danced by the tribe to be felt, at once, in the body; or told, or sung, to be heard by the listening ear. ALEXANDER MARSHACK
Equivocal Conservatism c~ By MAX EASTMAN
Although he has published eight books, it is hard not to think of Peter Viereck as a young boy-a precociously brilliant one. This latest book (Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals, Beacon Press, $4.00) carries on the impression. I never saw a book that contain@d so many wise remarks and passages of fine tasteful eloquence mingled with so much bad taste and disappointing foolishness. By bad taste I mean such cracks as these: "The danger to students of being branded for life by a Socialist is less than that of being blanded for life by a socialite." "Is it a patriotic triumph if the dawn's early glare reveals our flag progressing from ,being a door mat to being a fig leaf?" By foolishness I mean such as this: "He who says 'goodbye now,' instead of 'goodbye,' is also likely to be he who, when declining a cigarette, uses the verb 'use': 'No thanks, I don't use them': and there you have the personality that wished Taft had got the nomination in 1948 or 1952." What Viereck needs is an editor, or a trusted critical friend, or a little distrust of himself. He seems to be carried away by his own brilliance. What with erudition, wit, logic, jokes, jocules, metaphors, similes, synecdoches, and all those literary and intellectual things streaking through his brain like cars on the New Jersey turnpike, he just can't hang on to himself. They say he is a fast and furious talker, and this book, with all its wide learning and brainy sparkle, suggests loquacity rather than meditation. You get tired after a while and want to go away and read the encyclopedia or the dictionary, or something at least systematic. The "glory of the intellectuals" is their coming through with truth and lucid judgment in the conflict with Hitler's totalitarianism. Their "shame" is their failure to show, by and large, a grain of sense or a half-inch of consecutive and inwardly honest reasoning about Stalin's. It is on these two points that Viereck's penetration and grasp are so sure and his thesis so simple, that he rises to passages of reasoned eloquence that are both moving and convincing. "The boy can write!" you find yourself saying. And to prove it you turn to page 54, and read 'again his contrasting descriptions of Stalin's politburo-"the sober pedants of massacre"-and Hitler's more flam.. boyant Nazi leaders: Look at any recent picture of the dowdy politbu'ro! Suppose you did not know ahead the long list of genocidal crimes . . . attached to each one's name, the deportation of whole cities, the starvation of entire provinces. You would innocently imagine some retired hick constable in his anecdotage was boring you with
his home-talent Rogue's Gallery: two rows of swaggering, small town "fixers". . . . Each looks like a third assistant bookkeeper in the act of rising Napoleonically to second assistant bookkeeper. . . . Photographed at their political celebrations, the Nazis are less respectable, yet more "elegant." . . . Wee Goebbels, looking like" an evil-minded Charles Addams infant that had been slightly nibbled at by rats and then discarded as poisonous. Ley and St~eicher: trying to smile benevolently, that benign smIle of cadgers of free drinks and pinchers of very young girls. Hess, Rosenberg, and Schirach: trying to look wholesome and reputable in their neat unifornls but only looking like boy scouts suddenly caught abusing themselves . . .
Viereck can not only write, but when he knows what he is talking about, he can expound and eluci.. date, too. And where his subject is the American fellow-traveling highbrow, the new BabbitFY of the literary avant garde, Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale, free speech and the Communist conspiracy, he does know, down to the ground and a good way below that, what he is talking about. He must be a blaze of light to some of those befogged young students, the constitutional dopes and voluntary dupes of the Communist lie-factory, who wander into his courses at Mt. Holyoke. I wish every teacher in the United States could read what he says about the shame and glory of the intellectuals-could read this, for instance: Civil liberties do not protect all actions. Certain acts, for example murder, are barred. Menlbership in the Conlmunist party is morally an act comparable to murder. Mass murder in fact. Morally every Communist or Nazi party member is up to his elbows in the blood of his party's victims (Belchen, Dachau, Ka tyn, Korea). . . .
Unfortunately, Viereck's book does not stick to these subjects which he understands so well. It has a dis.. position to slide off and go galloping all over the contemporary scene of opinion, making remarks that are at times acutely penetrating, at others glibly superficial. His little subtreatise on Dewey's pragma.. tism, for instance, can only be dismissed in perfectly complete candor as bosh. The sole memorable thing here is his calm admission that he has not had time to study the pragmatists. "Is their smuggling in of values done by legiti.. mate philosophical logic? or is it a contradiction? . . . neither I nor 99 per cent of my readers are trained to answer [such] questions." What a confession! It wouldn't take two studious days with a book of, or about, John Dewey to find the answer: Dewey's philosophy starts with values, it ends with values; in both origin. and essence it is aN effort to MARCH 9, 1953
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defend the sovereignty of values in f ace of the skepticism begot by crude factual science. Another matter Viereck is not trained to talk about in my opinion, though it is the concluding subject of this book, is the return from revolutionary experiments to what he calls "conservatism." On that lifesaving journey he is a false, because a half-hearted guide. He will never bring us to the goal. And here, too, the reason is frankly confessed:' his is a literary and non-scientific mind. Not only is he "far more interested in art than politics," and addicted to "playing economics by ear, with deliberate amateurishness," but he makes of these predilections a veritable program of salvation. The proper start for an American conservatism . . . is in the world of literature, arts and sciences, intellec~ tual history, the universities the humanities. . . . If instead it tries to sta~~ by being directly and actively polItical and economic, it will . . . fail and transform nothing at all. Our civilization . . . its essentials its truth and its beauty ... are trans~ mitted more through the humanities than through that up-to-date journalism of the academic world, the courses in current politics, econom~ ics, and other uselessly "useful" techniques.
Having thus dismissed the weightier half of the causal nexus in which our problems arise, it is not surprising to find that Viereck's solution of these problems is a rather light and airy one. The main idea is -aside from being good, which is a valid but hardly a new conservatism -that we should be spiritual. We should be so spiritual that we are not tempted either by the plausibilities of socialist statism or by the anarchy of the free market economy. Socialist statism and ruthless private rivalry are two sets of hollow verbalisms, irrelevant to the reality of our spiritually-based mixed economy. . . . The spiritual basis for the still unfinished American experiment is . . . that enthusiastic, uncoerced, and non-statist cooperation between individualists which [Vachel] Lindsay called "civic ecstasy" . . . "Civic ecstasy can be so splendid, so unutterably afire, continuing and increasing. with such apocalyptic zeal, that the whole visible fabric of the world can be changed."
That· is Viereck's general answer 424
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to his own question: Which kind of conservatism? It leads him to regard "plutocracy," and especially "efforts to glamorize plutocracy as anti-statism," as on the whole a greater danger than statism. (At least it led him to declare that he would vote for Truman rather than Taft.) It leads him to describe Taft· as a "Robespierre endimanche." Which means "dressed up in his Sunday clothes," and is probably as inept an epithet as prej udiced politics and slipshod poetics could devise. How very remote is the danger of plutocracy in this country is indicated by Viereck himself when he dismisses as an outdated 'bogy "that old, toothless, moth-eaten lion of Wall Street." Nevertheless that moth-eaten lion-elsewhere described by him as a "leper-outcast"-is the stage property which enables Viereck, while seeming to steer adroitly between two dangers, actually to take his stand, or rather his drift 'with the forces that lead toward state control of our economic lives. That this means control of our literary and humanistic and spiritual lives, and most particularly our Hcivic ecstasies," is growing steadily more clear to those interested in knowing the causes of things. It is certainly no joyous sport for a poet to study economics (crede experto !), and I don't ask Viereck to drown his songs completely in this untuneful pursuit. But if he is going to fling out the banner of a new conservatism, and start a march of minds on upV Day" (his publisher's name for the publication date of this book) back to the great and forgotten wisdoms of the past, he has got to face up to the economic portion of these wisdoms a lot better than he has here. Whether he calls himself conservative or not is a semantic, not to say an advertising, question. But whether he recognizes the dependence of all our freedoms on the free market economy is of the essence. To call the recognition .of this wisdom a "nostalgia for laissez faire," to talk of "the economic necessity of a noneconomic credo," to assert that "though democratic socialism is a contradiction it is not one that necessarily leads to ruin," is an equivocation on the essential issue.
An UpsideDown World Out of Red China, by Liu ShawTong. Translated by Jack Chia and Henry Walter. New York and Boston: Duell, Sloan and PearceLittle, Brown & Co. $4.00 A great deal has been published in Chinese at Hong Kong and Taipei giving eye-witness and personal-experience accounts of Communist China. But the pro-Red and anti-antiCommunist climate built up in the literary world of English-speaking countries has deprived them up to now of this important source material. For that reason the appearance in English of Out of Red China is an important Free World victory. The victory was won in an uphill fight against almost insurmountable odds of prej udice, guilt complex, expense, and conspiracy. Even truthful reports written by American observers have to fight ,hard to get an unbiased hearing and a fair presentation in the book shops. As a Chinese, Liu has made the political phantasmagoria of life in Red China a bit more believable than they were. The tales he tells have been discounted generally by our people because they sounded unreal, hysterical, impossible to have happened. Red China's secret weapon against us has been its fantastically involved procedures and twisted lingo, which can be grasped only by an intensive reading and study for which most Americans think they are too busy to spare the time. Liu's book gives you an intimate "feel" of what the Communists mean by such peculiar phrases as "life experience," "getting emotional trouble," "dragging one's old-society tail," "merit meetings," and "judgment meetings," and a host of other forms of "newspeak." In every case, the connotation is what would seem least probable to us. It is, indeed, an insane world into which Liu escorts us. Class distinctions, absolutely inflexible in that world, put the "longterm member" and the. "long-term comrade superior"-except in time of purge-on an altogether higher level than the masses. And the masses aren't all the plain people. They are the non-Communist Party members, and" hence must eat at the "big
oven" and not the "middle oven," least of all at the "small oven." And besides inferior food, they must be satisfied with inferior clothing, housing, and amusement privileges. Even the word amusement has its new sense; to be properly so called and thus per:mitted it :must consti-
tute political indoctrination. Our sense of morality and romance is, of course, turned upside down. There is the glamor tale of the Communist girl who shot the young man she loved because she knew she must not marry outside the party, and he wasn't a member. There is the heroic son who refused to intervene in the completely unfair "people's trial" of his hardworking father, and watched him put to a cruel death rather than interfere with the "people's ·will."
It would take a social psychiatrist to explain ,the substitution of the word lover for the words husband and wife. They all must be called lovers now in Red China. The manipulation of words in this manner can help cripple the family system, so firm in the old China, by depriving it of an intelligible terminology. IViultiplied infinitely, with every slyly calculated variation that the Red hierarchy can concoct, such etymological changes must loosen the cement in any socia1 system. "Foul words," for instance, are not dirty words; they are words that are politically "not correct." That such fantastic tricks can constitute a phase of psychological warfare is itself something beyond normal comprehension. Two unforgivable faults in the new China are: "being too objective" and "expressing personal opinion." There is no unemployment under Communism, we were told, and until the facts of forced and slave labor came out, we thought this might mean what it would mean in the United States or England. But noquite the opposite. The same topsyturvy approach is required to understand that every Communist woman in China is assured a husband. He is gone to on Saturday nights, with the same routine as the Saturday· night bath of the past generation in America. No wonder ,that women, under this system, lose a taste for the conjugal relation. Thus
frustrated, they are better geared, emotionally, for their frenzied political responsibilities. These are a few of the realities of life as lived under China's Communism. The author belonged to the
propaganda corps. He learned that the purpose of journalism was "to support the Revolution and encourage fighting morale." DeHberate faking was required. White became black or black white, according to the destination of the edition. Editors got away with these lies because circulation was rigorously restricted iby law to assigned target areas. Liu's book is well written and gripping, but it presents only part of the picture. As Hu Shih explains in his introduction, it covers only 1949..;50, "usually described as the Honeymoon Period. . . before the beginning of the nation-wide Movement of Thought Reconstruction, of 'brain-washing,' and long before the truly terroristic '3-anti' and '5-anti' persecutions of 1952." The book was originally a series of articles written after the author's escape. They were subsequently compiled in book form in Chinese, and have now been edited and rearranged by the translators for English presentation. Such work requires time and expert language facility, and this, added to the usual costs of getting out· a 'book, makes it almost forbidding. The publishers are to be congratulated as well as the author and the translators. EDWARD HUNTER
Shorter And Better The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History, by C. W. Previte-Orton. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2 vols. $12.50
Whatever the virtues of "The Cambridge Medieval History"-the first volume of which appeared in 1911, the eighth and last in 1936-it suffered from some of the defects that mark all efforts at co-operative historical writing. Whatever the defects of The Shorter Can~bridge Medieval History, it e~hibits the virtues that result from single authorship, when the author is in full command of the knowledge and tal-
ents required by his undertaking. These two volumes, in which the man who edited the last five volumes of the larger work has skillfully distilled its essence, are characterized by no inequalities of style, no contradictions, no duplications-all of which seem to be unavoidable in a
co-operative enterprise. If, in the interests of brevity, the late Professor Previte-Orton seems sometimes to have left out too much, the fairminded reader will reflect that he can not have the advantages of brevity without its disadvantages. It is a vast stretch of history that these volumes survey: from the founding of Constantinople, in 330 A.D., to the closing decades of the fifteenth century. In the main it is the story of the Empire of the West and the Empire of the East, but the rise of Islam has its place in the narrative, and the Crusades extend the theater of action. In large measure it is the story of the Mediterranean world; but the scope of the work is large enough to embrace' chapters on the British Isles and the countries of northern and eastern Europe. And, of course, the light of the latest scholarship shines brightly upon it all-a light that has dispelled the ignorance that once made Hume refer to the history of the Middle Ages as a battle of kites and crows, and made Voltaire disIniss the same history as the doings of wolves and bears. The Byzantine Bmpire is done the justice it was denied until Finlay began to correct the myopic errors of the eighteenth century. And it is well that this justice is done on a popular level, that misconceptions which still persist among the unscholarly are at long last dispelled. For, as Goo~h has remarked: "To preserve Greek culture during the barbarism of the Middle Ages and to defend it against the assaults of Islam was to deserve well of civilization." The rise and endurance of Byzantium, the triumph of Christianity, the Dark Ages in the West, the evanescent Carolingian Empire, the conflicts of Popes and Emperors, Gregory VII and papal supremacy, the Crusades, feudal monarchies, and the increasing importance of towns with their novel social patterns, the fall of the Hohenstaufen, the .HunMARCH 9, 1953
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dred Year,s' War, the Great Schism and the Conciliar Movement, absolute monarchies humbling the pride and power of the nobles, the capture of Constantinople, the Wars of the Roses, individualism challenging authority and regimentation, the dawn of the Renaissance-these are a few of the milestones on the long road that we travel in Previte-Orton's learned, geni:al company. As we go, we glance all too quickly at schola'sticism, literature, and architecture. Our journey ends when "the oceanic stage was about to succeed the Med'iterrane'an in commerce. The horizon receded in world politics." And, a'S we look back, we may well agree with our guide: Taken as a whole, the history of the Middle Ages after the ruin in the West of the' ancient civilization is one of progress, progress in society, government, order and organization, laws, the development of huUlan faculties, of rational thought, of knowledge and experience, of art and culture. Man throughout had been restlessly creative and aspiring. But that progres's to a better life had been perpeitually thwarted and delayed, not merely by external disasters but by the passions and wilful ambitions of men themselves. . . . Innate barbarism broke from its fetters time and time again. Potent delusions summoned their appropriate nemesis. In our distant retrospect we can perceive how crooked and perilous was the upward road.
There are those who insist that it is a waste of time for us to re'ad any history that is not "us'able." If they me'an by this that we should read history only if we can use it as a det'ailed guide to conduct, then we should read no history at all; for it can perform no such service. But, in a larger sense, all history, even the most distant, most obscure, is usable, for it enlarges and deepens our knowledge of m'ankind, ourselves, and our fellows. Indeed, Carlyle hardly exaggerated when he decl'ared: "History is not only the fittest study but the only study, and includes all others." No man can really know where he is, and why, unless he knows by what road he has come to where he is, and why. It was through the Middle .Ages that we c'ame to where we are; and to the Middle Ages these volumes are an excellent introduction. As we read them we remember that Schop426
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enhauer said: "The motto of history should be: Eadem, sed aliter." And we can not take leave of them without noting how greatly their value is enhanced by the abundant illustrations, many of them rare, that have been chosen with erudition and taste by Dr. S. H. SteinBEN RAY REDMAN berg.
"General" Opinion Your War for Peace, by Frank L. Howley, Brigadier General,AUS (inactive). New York: Holt. $2.75 To any American who is seeking factual information concerning political, economic, and psychological developments as well as military in the Western European area, this should be a most welcome book. It is amusing, interest-sustaining, and provocative.The author is a man of wide experience, possessing a keen analytical mind, and having lived abroad many years is capable of careful analyses in the international fieid. One (i)f the most interesting parts of the book is the author's candid attempt to answer the question-why on the whole our American foreign I?olicies have not succeeded in Western Europe? Whether his analyses are correct in all details or not, the data he has so skillfully compiled, and the conclusions he has reached, should make an important contribution to the understanding of the political temper of Europe. One of the remarkable features . of the book is a firsthand account of the machinations of Soviet representatives in Germany after World War Two. The author's personal experience with the chicanery and subversive actions of these men in Berlin should dispel any notion that friendly co-operation and good faith are possible with the Soviet Union under its present leadership. General Howley's book is fascinatingand informative. It is written with skill and accuracy and with the full authority of one who has observed and participated in the struggle he is discussing. It points the way for realism and dynamic action in our relations 'with foreign nations, both friendly and hostile. ALBERT C. WEDEMEYER
Honest-to-God Nephew My Uncle Joseph Stalin, by Budu
Svanidze. Translated by Waverley Root. New York: Putnam. $3.00 Strange as ilt may seem, there is a living man who has the right to call Stalin Uncle Joe, or, as the people in Stalin's native Georgia say, Uncle Sosso. Having quit Uncle Joe's service, this man, Budu Svanidze, is now in a position to write about his distinguished relative in human terms. Svanidze's defection, however, was not inspired either by a family quarrel or by disgust with the Soviet regime. As he explains the situation, it was an affair of the heart. He fell in love with a Hungarian Catholic woman who could not come to the Soviet Union. Rather than part with her, he decided to join the ranks of what the Russians call "the nonreturners." His distinguished family connection and his employment. in a Soviet foreign mission made his escape easy. Judging from the book, he still 'regards his uncle with affectionate respect-and this probably increases his prospects of living to a ripe old age. Stalin is represented in this book as a man of simple but not austere tastes, fond of hunting and games (he cheats at croquet, but no one is supposed to notice it), a strict disciplinarian with his two favorite children, his son Vassily and his daughter Svetlana, and a Quiz Kid when it is a question of supplying the right answer, whether this is a quotation from Goethe's Faust or the date of the founding of the First International. Stalin relaxes best when he has Georgians around him, and Svanidze was admitted to his uncle's company fairly often, sometimes alone, sometimes in the presence of the chief lieutenants. Stalin, according to his nephew, is a persistent tease and causes some unhappy moments to his guests, who are not supposed to tease back. A rare exception to this rule was the former War Minister, Klim Voroshilov, a close associate of Stalin during the years of the Russian civil war. He retorted to one of Stalin's gibes by telling the anecdote according to which Stalin, asked to choose a design for a monument to
the great Russian poet, Pushkin, selected a large statue of himself holding a small volume of Pushkin. The Soviet dictator, according to Svanidze, was fishing in the Black Sea near a Caucasian resort when the news of Hitler's invasion ar-
"rn break the backs of all the rotten riffraff who want to plunge our coup.try into corruption! I'll have no mercy on them! None of them! N'one of them!" Stalin on this occasion also expressed regret that Robespierre had
from that world of quality with its sense of providential direction. Cecil revives it eloquently for his readers while they journey with him through his London town house~ which was destroyed by enemy action during the war.
rived. He directed the war opera-
been overthrown. He may perhaps
It might have been anyone of
tions from a deep bombproof shelter in the Kremlin, which had access to some of the old tunnels of this medieval fortress-palace, tunnels designed to provide escape routes for tsars who were threatened by rebellion or mutiny. Malenkov, who at present seems to be the most likely candidate for the Stalinite succession, is by origin a' Bashkir, member of a Mohammedan tribe which lives between the Volga and the Urals. And one of the Walter Winchell touches in this book is the story of a volley-ball game in which Stalin took part: Malenkov hit Marshal Zhukov, with whom he had been quarreling, in the nose with the ball. Zhukov's reaction was an international but unprintable curse; and the two men never have been good friends since.
take a grim pride in the fact that he has carried on for a generation the murderous terror which brought about Robespierre's downfall after a little more than a year. The author carefully avoids anything that might suggest an indictment of the Soviet regime; but some of the casual observations in the book are all the more impressive because they are not stated in the tones of an accuser. One footnote after another is an obituary notice of some character in the story, shot during the purge. The author speaks of "a great concentration camp on Lake Baikal, containing more than 150,000 prisoners." And he refers to Yezhov, a head of the political police who for a time possessed power of life and death over the whole Soviet population, as "half mad, a sadist and a victim of persecution mania," who comm.itted suicide when he was belatedly consigned to an insane asylum.
those stately Regency houses, set back from their iron railings, whose quiet elegance seemed to rebuke the American soldiers for intruding on the tranquillity of that tree-shaded London Square. World War Two had billeted our U. S. Air Force headquarters in Bryanston Square. I doubt if our presence, with morning reveilles, army vans, and the general scramble and loud ;bull sessions heard from the barracks, would have been any more welcome than the Germans or Russians to a man of Cecil's bent. On the other hand, he might actually have been one of those tall fine-chiseled, gray-haired men in the neighborhood who would stop one of us now and then for a chat. We can never be altogether certain. But Mr. Cecil, who has several scholarly biographies to his credit, strikes me as a man who would prefer to view the passing panorama from his study window. From the start Cecil asks not to be compared to "those eminent men -duces, fiihrers, comrades in marshal's clothing or marshals in mufti, great men in occupation of high places or imitators in low ones." His fearless attack on Britain's foreign policy and his indignant criticism of Russia, rej ecting her as H professedly anti-God and lying today at the mercy of the sadistic mind," were not very favora1bly received when his book first appeared overseas. But readers, Catholic or nonCatholic, will find little quarrel with these sane political views now. In fact, they may wish that the author had devoted as much space to cutting bureaucrats down to size as he has to metaphysical discussions and highly erudite examinations into the mysteries and origins of the Christian faith. Gifted, as so manycul:tured Englishmen are, with rare agility in spinning words and moods like the poets, Algernon Cecil makes a delightful guide through the storehouse of his memories. The hooks he has read and the "adventures of ideas" provide one of the threads
The author does not convey the impression of being an intellectual heavyweight. He takes the Soviet WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN system for granted without either eulogy or criticism, and he obviously regards his uncle with admiration as the successful man of the family Senses who also helped along at various pinches in his own career. Despite the many anecdotal stories of Stalin A House in Bryanston Square, by Algernon Cecil. New York: Harin slippers, figuratively speaking, court, Brace & Go. $5.00 one does not get a clear picture of the influences that shaped his deci- It is almost a decade since I was sions on internal policy. There is still first affected by the exquisite prose less about the right hand and the left of this deeply moving "recherche du hand of his foreign policy, diplo- temps perdu" written hy a member macy, and fifth column subversion. of one of England's famous families. Perhaps the most revealing pas- Re-reading it in the recent American sage in the book is a description of edition has set me to wondering a talk with Stalin in 1936, when the again if there will ever be another great purge of the Communist Party memoir like it. Algernon Cecil, who was in fun swing. One of the moti- is already past seventy, may well vations of the purge, according to represent the last of a breed of this account, was a kind of puritani- English aristocrats whose Roman cal moralism. Stalin stormed against Catholic background and humanistic the loose living of some of his pros- influences in politics and the arts pective victims, declared that the made the age of Victoria so great. French Revolution collapsed because Lord Acton's wise counsels on of the degeneration of the morals of church and state are suddenly being its leaders, and, working himself up discovered fifty years after his into a frenzy of rage and hatred, death. Here, on a smaller, more intimate scale, is another heritage cried:
Noble In Both
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running through this unique personal .chronicle. His book is primarily, as he states, the work of two people-one the narrator and the other his dead wife, whom he oalls "Allegra," and whose spirit, summoned back as it were to grace the rooms of their charming abode, is the embodiment of all the best arguments for aristocracy. Seldom has a writer paid such an ardent, tremulously beautiful tribute to a woman as Cecil does to "Allegra" in these pages. He sees in her "qualities reminiscent of times when women were more concerned with distilling the subtle essence of grace at home than battling directly with the storm of the world's unrest." On another level this is a tale of the spiritual ascent of modern man, the homo sapiens, dogged by the question of "the ever-lasting yea or nay." Mr. Cecil's loving devotion to his wife and all that she symbolizes to him draws him to the upper reaches of the house where no "alien voice" can be heard. But not, however, before he has numerous intellectual debates with philosophers, mystics, and literary masters, and leaves them behind or shuts them out of certain rooms. "They have," says Cecil, as he excludes the German philosophers, Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, from the dining room, "a gross way of dealing with the nectar and ambrosia of human thought." As for those minds which have welcome-mats put out for them, it is not at all surprising that all three are masters in modern humanism: Rabelais presiding over the pleasures of the table: Montaigne equally at ease with the ladies and the men in the' Chinese room; and Pascal, with the fire of his vision, lighting the way upstairs to the stars and the Kingdom of God. Cecil manages to find considerable support in Pascal for the aristocratic principle he upholds. "In that most exacting demand of, traditional Ghristianity lay the real answer to all the shallow modern talk about equality in a manifestly unequal and evidently hierarchical world. Neither revolution nor ridicule will alter the ways of nature; and the e~tinction of the aristocrat will only hasten the advent of the despot and the par428
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venue Meanwhile, no Communist has yet been heard to complain of the inequality in the garden. And if, as a popular poem incautiously asserts, we are nearer to God's heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth, God was pretty plainly no Marxist." To establish some kind of communication between the living, the dead, and those about to die, is perhaps what Cecil refers to when he says: "I believe that I recognized almost from the first that the spoilt design of national and individual life left still some larger purpose untroubled and untouched." A bomb had only a few minutes earlier sent his stately house Grashing around him. There is courage as well as a critical, precise, and Christian intellect in this rich, provocative book. It may appea:r more often solemn than gay, but then, after all, the theme is a sober one. Despite countless passages in which Cecil displays a lively, sometimes pawky wit, as when satirizing the muddlers and meddlers at Whitehall and Westminster, or paraphrasing Voltaire's Candide, it is as a "lament over time past" that his noble book will endure. RICHARD Me LAUGHLIN
A.E.F. in Siberia The Siberian Fiasco, by Clarence A. Manning. New York: Library Publishers. $3.75 Professor Manning of the faculty of Slavonic languages at Columbia is one of that gallant band of American university teachers who never salaamed to Communism or socialism even in the darkest days of the N'ew Deal. As in his previous writingsof which this reviewer particularly remembers his articles on the Eastern Orthodox Churches and his study of Ukrainian. nationalismreaders will find in this book the same conscientious regard for facts lucidly and temperately set forth, and the same warm fairness in judging character which enables him to show how this or that individual saw the events of the moment. He begins and ends by showing the futility of the American Expeditionary Force in Siberia during the civil war as a vividly instructive
part of the world-wide chaos which still continues. On page 3 we read: The Bataan death march, .the Soviet coneentration camps, the :mass murders in China, were all in em:bryo in the Siberian chaos . • . the idealism of the early twentieth century was confronted with the facts of that century in eastern Asia and it preferred to be defeated and nullified rather than to make an effort to understand the situation. . • . The material . . . available for a study of the country and the participants ... was not used. Emphasis was laid upon doctrines and theories. . . . Americans today are fortunate that they can speak of a Siberian fiasco and not of a Siberian' disaster.
The author concludes on page 194: It is time now thirty years later . . . to rethink the problems • • • [of] . . . those unfortunate years. When that is done, the fiasco will seem a preview of the present, a foolish but not a criminal episode in the confusion of World War I, and it may offer substantial hope, by teaching what to avoid, for the settlement of the present stage of the Asiatic problem as it affects world peace and the hope of a better life for all men.
The main body of Professor Manning's narrative opens with an admirable little sketch of the Russian and Chinese empires and of the Russian Revolution. Although both of those great states had a national nucleus, neither was a nation. Each was painted in a single color upon our maps but each contained a great series of suppressed peoples, many. of whom possessed a strong national consciousness of their own. In the Tsar's empire the dominant Great Russians were actually in a minority compared with the total of the other nationalities. Upon both patchwork empires the Chinese and Russian Revolutions had suddenly imposed a chaos of clashing ideas, without roots in habit or tradition. The Western governments and peoples, absorbed in their exhausting struggle against the Kaiser's Germany, saw the whole Russian situation in more or less unreal terms. In July, 1918, when Wilson decided to send a small Expeditionary Force to Siberia there seems to have been little co-ordination between the State and War Departments as to what was to be done there. Certain more recent episodes make one
suspect that there may have been no co-ordination at all. The commander, Major General William S. Graves, a Texan and a West Pointer of the class of 1889, was chosen, like Pershing, because he could be counted on to obey orders
Readers will follow the whole picturesque and admirably written story with absorbing interest. With perhaps more confidence since the November elections, they may also murmur "Korea" and "How long, oh Lord, how long?"
rigidly. His brienng-a short inter-
HOFFMAN NICKERSON
view in a private room in the Kansas City railroad station with the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker, who was about to catch a train for the East-was farcically hasty. His only written directive-a typically Wilsonian sermon, long on ethical principles .and short on references to the facts of life in Siberia or elsewhere -was tragically inadequate. He must definitely not "intervene" in what had been the Tsar's empire, and his chief mission was to guard certain military stores in the pious hope that they might some day be useful to "the Russians." Which Russians was not stated. From all this there arose a series of floundering uncertainties, relieved only by the high sense of duty both of the commander and of his command, and at times by gallant episodes of which all Americans can be proud. Even Graves's fine qualities, his humanity and dogged obedience to orders as he understood them, were nullified by his incomprehension and most of all by the total failure of Washington to inform and guide him. He could not see that in the dissolution of Russian society brutal leaders must everywhere come to the top, and since he was in contact with the White factions and not with the Reds he mistakenly believed the former to be more brutal than the latter. When the State Department turned against the Reds he was not told. A climax of misunderstanding arose when he was not notified that the State Department was sending an American officer independent of his command to act as liaison between Washington and the headquarters of Semenov, a ferocious anti-Bolshevik leader with whom Graves's outfit had had both misunderstandings and skirmishes. A chief subordinate of Graves arrested that officer and unsuccessfully charged him with insanity, apparently with the support of Graves himself!
Walpole Himself Hugh Walpole: A Biography, by Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Macmillan Company. $5.00 In his novel, Cakes and Ale, Somerset Maugham gave us in one Elroy Kear the adroitly limned portrait of a successful novelist with a passion for the podium-a bouncy, pretentious fellow of meager talents,a literary and social snob determined to build himself into a grand old man of letters. Even had there been any doubt as to whom Maugham had in mind, Hugh Walpole's reaction would have given the show away. He wriggled and protested and finally wrote Maugham a tearful, why-did-you-dothis-to-me letter. But even before Maugham could deny his culpability, vValpole had forgiven him. Maugham was also a successful writer, and Walpole not only worshipped success but there was always the possibility that the success of the other fellow might be manipulated so that it would augment and enrich one's own. In an indifrect and somewhat feline way, Rupert Hart-Davis bears out the Maugham diagnosis. For one thing, he had only to let the diaries and journals speak for themselves, for in them Walpole let himself go with an abandon rarely encountered except in a psychiatrist's office. Hugh Walpole was one of the most popular and prolific writers of fiction of our time. He wrote his first novel at the age of thirteen and his first published book, The Wooden Horse, brought him success at the age of twenty-five. He wrote more than fifty novels, and at one time had five awaiting publication. He had a system. He enlisted the interest and support of other literary lights by means of a not very subtle appeal to their vanity. He bombarded them with letters, praising their work and incidentally mentioning his own aspirations. When a critic
panned one of his books (he was convinced that adverse criticism was based on personaT dislike), he would invite him to lunch and over the coffee concede that the critic was probably right and humbly ask his advice. There were two critics, however, with whom he made no head-
way-Rebecca West and Katherine Mansfield. He was not at his best with women who were long on brains as they were. Hugh Walpole longed for two things: fame and love. He enjoyed fame, when it came, with a childlike exuberance. It would have been perfect had it not been for the very different fame of people like Virginia Woolf. "My only trouble in writing," he says, "is that, wriggle as I may, I'm definitely old-fashioned. Now, I'd like to be modern. I'd rather be a male Hugh Walpole to a female Virginia Woolf than anything else on earth. How nice if they said: 'This new novel of Hugh Walpole's may be very beautiful, but we can't be sure because we don't understand a word of it.' ... I'd truly love that!" Women as such frightened him. Those who became his friends were the kind who made no demands on him and with whom he could be gaily and sexlessly affectionate. His quest for love involved him in a number of unhappy and humiliating situations before the Right One came along. Among the first objects of his idolatry was A. C. Benson. "There is no doubt," he confided to his diary, "that I have fallen in love with Benson. Most purely, let it be said." There was the rather bloodless attachment between him and Henry James followed by a more warm friendship with Melchior, the singer, which petered out when Melchior married. In his fortieth year he found what he was looking for in the person of one Harold Cheevers. Cheevers was a London patrolman, a .champion swimmer and crack shot. He became Walpole's chauffeur and constant companion and was with him when he died. During the bombing of London in World War Two, Walpole worried about the pictures he had collected. "I look at my Utrillos, my Bellinis, and Cezannes," he says, "with a burning, protective love. No matter if I go they must remain. They are .more important MARCH 9, 1953
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than I am, but I would sacrifice the whole lot for Harold's little finger." No wonder he remarked after reading Proust: "He is just my sort. I understand how he feels." Mr. Hart-Davis has done an excellent job. His affection for his subject has not blinded him to his faults, and he gives a vivid picture of the English literary world of which Walpole was so much a part. It is infinitely more interesting than anything Walpole himself ever wrote -largely because Walpole was infinitely more interesting than any character he created. In short, even if you don't care for Walpole's novels you will enjoy this book. ALIX DU POY
News About Matthew Arnold The Notebooks of Matthew Arnold, edited by Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young and Waldo Hilary Dunn. New York: Oxford University Press. $10.00 Matthew Arnold's most famous poem is almost certainly "Dover Beach," and its best-known stanza is certainly the last one, in which the poet exclaims, "Ah, love, let us be true to one another I", cries out that in this seemingly fair world of ours there is "really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain," and concludes with his somber, enduring image of "a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." Here speaks the Arnold known to ~very reader who knows him at allthe romantic pessimist, torn between faith and disbelief, hovering between a vanished world and a world powerless to be born; the Arnold who wished with all his soul that he might have enjoyed the sweet felicity, the sure security, of living in an age when "the sea of faith was at the full." ·Rather less well known to most readers is the Arnold who, publishing as he went, worked his way from a religion that was almost wholly identifiable with morality to a religion that, transcending mere ethics, derived its sanctions· from the benignant fatherhood of God and the saving intercession of Jesus. 430
THE FREEMAN
Still less well known is the Arnold of the notebooks, partially revealed to the public gaze· in 1902, but now fully exposed for the first time-the once pessimistic poet, the once wordly dandy, who for the last thirty-odd years of his life yearned after righteousness, con s tan t I y goaded himself along the course of moral action, prayed for humility, piously worshipped in the privacy of his study, endeavored steadfastly to serve God well, and sought salvation by attempting to walk in the steps of Christ. The editors of these notebooks, kept annually from 1852 to 1888 (and augmented here by two "general notebooks" and annual reading lists), have performed an arduous task of exacting scholarship that has been in process for twenty years. They deserve the hearty thanks of all thoughtful readers of Arnold and students of his age. A hostile critic once remarked that Arnold's "self-imposed mission" was "to give good advice to the English people as to their manifest faults." It may be said that he assigned the same mission to his notebooks as regards himself-with a somewhat loftier mission superimposed. They were his constant instructors and monitors in the field of right conduct; they were also his spiritual guides, sources of edification, and wells of religious inspiration from which he could draw with the assurance that he could never drain them dry. Year after year, from the writings of six .languages, he copied out texts-to-live-by; and, year after year, he wrote down again and again those texts that he found most reliable and most uplifting. He did not always copy accurately; he did not try to, or care to, for he was concerned .not with the letter but the spirit. It should be mentioned in passing that, in accordance "with the wishes of Arnold's family and of the publishers, there is no translation of entries. in foreign or classical languages." And it should ,be mentioned also that the texts in English form only a fraction of the present volume, the rest being in Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian. The New Testament is present in abundance, mostly in Greek, occasionally in English; and the Bible as a whole, with Psalms and Proverbs prime favorites, furnishes more
quotations than any other single source. But De lmitatione Christi runs the Bible a close second. Here is more than ample proof that Arnold agreed with John Wesley's opinion of this potent little book: "A serious mind will never be sated with it, though it were read a thousand times over; for these general principles are the seeds of meditation, and the stores they contain are never exhausted." Here also is proof, though it tells us nothing new, that Arnold was one of Goethe's most devoted pupils. Among other lessons, Goethe is forever reminding him that, "It is better to do the most trivial thing in the world than regard a half hour as trivial"; or crying: "Create! The daily task of my hands-high happiness that I complete it." Similarly, Joubert tells hinI that "nothing so much augments discouragement as idleness." But one might quote endlessly the words of many writers from this book of multitudinous quotations. I should like to make only two more points in this brief review. It is worth noting that in the year 1867, when "Dover Beach" was first published, Arnold set down in· his notebook, one following another, these short lines: "The word which· I speak is not mine but .the Father's which sent me." "I proceeded forth and came from God, neither came I of myself, but He sent me." HI do nothing of myself." "I seek not mine own glory." "The will of God." "To please God." "In knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life." It is true that recent scholarship has decided that "Dover Beach" was probably written in 1850, but the point is that Arnold, seventeen years later, was willing to commit himself simultaneously .to such profoundly different public and private utterances. The other point I would make is that it is interesting to read the notebooks -the bulk of them, that is, for they contain some miscellaneous material -as the record of one side of a prolonged spiritual and moral civil war within the writer's own breast. There are ·men who -are saints by nature, but Matthew Arnold was not one of them. Indeed, even his effort to teach himself·· humility must have been a cruel and indecisive· battle. BEN RAY REDMAN
II
THE
J~ rreeman
REPRINTS
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